LIBRAR Y OF C ONGRESS. 

Shelf ^^sJc-^f\n-- 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



GLEANINGS 



FROM 



POI^TEESINA AND THE UPPEE 
EI^GADINE. 




HOWARD PAYSON ARNOLD. 



" This valley fits the purpose passing well." 




BOSTON: 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 

1880. 




The Riverside Press, Cambridge: 
nted by H. O. Houghton and Company. 



FOEEWOEDS, 



The father of Lord Beaconsfield, author of 
''The Calamities and Quarrels of Authors," and 
— indirectly — of not a few of the calamities and 
quarrels of England as well, remarks that '' a 
prefacer is generally a most accomplished liar." 
As he wrote various prefaces himself his opinion 
is entitled to considerable esteem and may prop- 
erly take its place among those other " Amenities 
of Literature" which made him so famous. To 
many the statement might appear altogether too 
sweeping, and no one can denj^ that even a hard- 
ened prefacer has certain inalienable rights and, 
like other criminals, cannot be deprived of such 
benefit as may come from a doubt. There have 
been writers and writers, prefaces and prefaceSj 
and surely in the lapse of ages some of the former 
may have happened, however unintentionally, to 
present the truth in an introductorj^ garb, while 
some of the latter may have been punctuated with 
a few desultory facts, if only from sheer perverse- 
ness. Still, whether accurate or not, this conclu- 
sion of a veteran observer may well cast a shadow 
over any author about to address himself to this 



iv 



FOREWORDS. 



part of his labors and beget a natural desire to 
condense it into the smallest possible compass, es- 
pecially if nature has endowed him with a weak- 
ness for yeracity. One cannot deliberately pro- 
ceed to demoralize his readers in cold blood, as 
it were, and to debase eyen acknowledged facts 
by exposure to a tainted atmosphere. Haying a. 
proper regard for yirtue in general and an admira- 
tion for truth in particular, I haye therefore de- 
cided to omit this portion of my work entirely 
and haye transferred to the main body the matter 
which would otherwise haye been here set forth, 
and there the patient seeker will find it. By 
this explanation I desire to mollify the discon- 
tent of those who look upon a preface as essential 
to the full perfection of eyery book and who, 
though they seldom peruse it. think themselyes in 
a manner wronged, if it be not forthcoming. As 
we haye the authority of Shakespeare for the say- 
ing that — 

Travelers ne'er did lie, 
Though fools at home condemn 'em," 

I trust my readers will not refuse to the candid 
narrator that credit which they would be justified 
in withholding from a perjured prefacer. 

H. P. A. 



CONTEXTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

The Uppee E>-gadixe 1 

CHAPTER II, 

POXTEESIXA . , . , . IS 

CHAPTER III. 
Po>'TEE?iNA (coutiuued) , ... 36 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Schlecht Peomexade. — The Eixv^a . . . , , 55 

CHAPTER V. 

The Eoseg Glaciee en' Voituee. — The Roseg Gea- 
ciEE A Pied. — Th^ Aech-Chemic Sry." — The 
''•Hermit or the Dale" 6S 

CHAPTER YI. 
Alpine Elowees. — The Ceaibea Pixe S4 

CHAPTER VII. 
The English Chuech at PoyTEESiXA 100 

CHAPTER VIIL 
Su>:dat at Poxteesixa 116 



vi 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER IX. 

PAGE 

John Bull at Large 135 

CHAPTER X. 

Botany in the Enoadine 152 

CHAPTER XL 
The Etruscans in the Enoadine 177 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA AND 
THE ENGADINE. 



CHAPTER L 

THE UPPER ENGADINE. 

" The sad and serious village of Pontresina," 
as Mme. Michelet describes it, is situated in the 
Engadine, a district in the canton of the Grisons 
which occupies the southeasterly corner of Switz- 
erland. On the east this district joins Tyrol, of 
which Nature evidently designed it to be a portion, 
while on the south it reaches to the boundaries of 
Italy. The inhabitants call it in their vernacular, 
Oeni-gadina, or Upper Valley of the Inn, from its 
principal stream. The approaches are most pict- 
uresque and no charm that could win the eye of a 
traveler is wanting to the landscape. From the 
banks of the Rhine and the rest of Switzerland 
beyond lead the Schyn, the Albula and the Julier 
passes. On the southerly side of the Rsetian Alps 
the Bernina diverges from the Stelvio and affords 
an avenue from the Italian province of the Valtel- 
line. By the Maloja, however, which is the lowest 
of all the Alpine highways out of Italy, it is more 



2 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



accessible than by any other route and the won- 
derfully varied scenerj^ of this pass, no less than 
its convenience, makes it a great favorite with 
those tourists who resort to the Engadine from 
the south. Starting from the town of Chiavenna 
fifteen miles north of the Lake of Como, an admi- 
rable road conducts to the summit by a tolerably 
steep ascent of twenty miles. At this point, six 
thousand feet above the level of the sea, begins an 
ample stretch of table land, the plateau of the 
Maloja, which is several miles long and presents a 
most fascinating combination of snow and verdure, 
water and flowers. Here first are met the sources 
of the Inn, and here commencing the valley that 
is supported and adorned by its flow extends in a 
northeasterly direction for sixty miles to the Aus- 
trian confines. Often inclosed on either side by 
lofty mountains capped with white, which slope, 
at times with great abruptness, down to trees 
and herbage, it alternately expands into luxuriant 
spaces of meadow land, or contracts into narrow 
defiles noisy with a dark and tumultuous torrent. 
Thus leaving Switzerland by the gorge of Finster- 
miinz, the river broadens through Tyrol towards 
the Danube, lingering in its flow by Hohenlinden, 
and lighting up with beauty a region which the 
soldier's valor and the poet's genius have endowed 
with a twofold immortality. 

The natural structure of the country has severed 
this vallej^ into two portions about the same as to 
length, though differing in elevation. The Upper 



THE UPPER ENGADINE. 



3 



Engadine terminates near Scanfs, a hamlet lying 
at a height of 5300 feet and thirty miles distant 
from the head of the Maloja, while the Lower 
Engadine, more fertile and more populous and 
with outlines not quite so sternly grand, finds its 
limit at Martinsbruch, which has an altitude of 
3350 feet and is the lowest as well as the last 
town in the valley. Throughout both divisions 
the mother tongue is the Rumansh, a dialect of 
the Ladin language,^ but German and Italian are 
much used, particularly towards, their respective 

1 The Ladin is the form gradually taken by the Latin of an- 
tiquity, as spoken by several uncivilized races who employed it 
merely to express their few ideas, and whose burly throats and 
callous tongues soon reduced its beauties to a state of deformity 
quite repulsive except to those who knew nothing better. The 
Rumansh idiom is peculiarly crude, the more so that it has no 
literature deserving the name. A short example may not be void 
of interest. In the Yulgate, St. Jerome's version of the Bible, 
the Parable of the Prodigal Son begins in this way, as narrated 
by St. Luke, xv. 11: — 

"11. Homo quidam habuit duos filios : 

" 12. Et dixit adolescentior ex illis patri : Pater, da mihi por- 
tionem substantise quse me contingit. Et divisit illis substan- 
tiam." 

The New Testament used by the inhabitants of the Upper 
Engadine reveals this passage under the following shape : — 
"11. Un hom havaiva duos filgs : 

" 12. Et il juven d'els dschet al bap. Bap, dom la part della 
facolted, ch' im po tucher. Et el dividet ad els la facolted." 

Had the saintly author lived to witness this grotesque aspect of 
his life's work, surely nothing short of a miracle would have been 
needed to enable him to recognize his own offspring in this rudis 
indigestaque moles. We are told that Enoch was translated that 
he should not see death." It was the hard fate of St. Jerome to 
suffer death and translation both. 



4 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



frontiers. Of these the former is encroaching with 
a slow but inevitable persistence, the more surely 
that it is everywhere taught in the schools. Even 
now the youth of the province speak it with flu- 
ency and precision, while the public notices on the 
church doors and elsewhere are posted in that as 
well as in the older idiom. The population num- 
bers about twelve thousand, the Upper Engadine 
containing somewhat over one fourth. As to their 
religious belief, with the sole exception of the little 
village of Tarasp in the lower valley where Cathol- 
icism prevails, they profess the faith of Calvin and 
his later adherents, and nowhere in Christendom 
does one find a community happier, more prosper- 
ous, or evincing a higher moral tone. 

Though it is not my design to trace the prog- 
ress of the Engadine ah ovo^ like the German biog- 
rapher of Hercules, it may not be amiss to recall 
the principal facts of its history. At the dawn of 
our era it belonged, with much other mountainous 
territory adjacent in every direction, to the Ro- 
man province of Rsetia, which then included Tyrol 
and other lands, now Austrian, on the east and 
north, while westwardly it spread beyond the 
Splugen and the abundant pastures to which this 
led. The great majority of the Rgeti in that day 
were Celts,^ descendants of those barbaric hordes 

1 ^' In geschichtlicher Zeit finden wir in Raetien nur, oder fast 
nur keltische Wahr-zeichen/^ (Lorenz Diefenbach. Origines Eu- 
ropasae.) 

" The region of the Alps and the lower countries immediately 



THE UPPER ENGADINE, 



6 



which had ravaged Europe ages before the ad- 
vent of any human chroniclers to record their 
rapine. By these the country had so long been 
occupied, that the identity of the original owners, 
if, indeed, they themselves were not the first pos- 
sessors, had been gradually lost in the vagueness 
of tradition. It was Augustus Csesar who first 
turned his inauspicious attention towards these 
Alpine valleys and who, urged by the mere lust 
of conquest, sent his legions to annex them to his 
already swollen empire, though, they could contrib- 

surrounding those mountains were the immemorial abode of sev- 
eral nations of the Celtic race, who claim this country as its origi- 
nal inhabitants ; that is, there is no record of their having come, 
whether from Gaul or any other quarter, nor is any trace dis- 
coverable in the country of earlier occupants." (Researches into 
the Physical History of Mankind. James Cowles Prichard. 
1841.) 

We hence find that the original settlements of the Celtic race 
comprehended, as far as we can collect, nearly all the mountain- 
ous barrier to the northward of Italy as far as the Adriatic." 
(Ibidem.) 

Richard F. Burton, in his Etruscan Bologna, opines that the 
Celts first appeared in Europe about three thousand years be- 
fore Christ, though, if success crowns the efforts which several 
eminent savants are now making to include them in that no- 
name series of nations which preceded all history, by identifying 
them with the people of the Bronze Age, they will be consigned to 
an antiquity much more remote. This would be a grateful con- 
summation to those who sympathize with Hawthorne's remark 
that "sublime and beautiful facts are best understood when 
etherealized by distance,'' while many who have had to do with 
that portion of the Celtic element which inscrutable destiny, for 
reasons known only to itself, has preserved to our own day, would 
derive a practical delight from its removal to a location as distant 
as the wit of man could invent. 



6 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



ute but slightly either to its wealth or to its num- 
bers. A single cruel campaign, short, sharp, and 
decisive, under his step-sons, Tiberius and Drusus, 
finished their subjugation and persuaded them to 
accept the peculiar blessings which those warlike 
apostles tendered them at the point of the sword. 
It was ever the imperial policy to " strike once 
and strike no more," and hard necessity left the 
Rseti no choice but to serve as a fresh example of 
its results. Yet they did not succumb without a 
contest, and the fierce and tenacious energy of 
their resistance excited the applause of their con- 
querors, while it gave them a title which none 
could dispute to the fame which the pen of Hor- 
ace sought to confer upon them. We are told that 
the women ^ fought shoulder to shoulder with the 

1 The rights of woman in ancient times were such as this de- 
generate generation has not yet conferred upon her. The above 
is only one instance out of many that might be cited to prove the 
superior appreciation with which she was then regarded. The 
Etruscans, like some other nations to the north of Italy with 
whom they probably had a common origin, held their women in 
high esteem and numerous costly sepulchres still remain to attest 
their pride of place. Among the Teutonic races, according to 
Tacitus, the bride was reminded on her marriage that she came to 
her husband as the sharer of his labors and dangers and botli in 
peace and in war must suffer and dare the same as himself. Wom- 
an was similarly respected by the early Britons, who were, more- 
over, sufficiently gallant to permit her, provided she were free, mar- 
ried, and the owner of five acres of land, to vote in their assemblies. 
Among the Anglo-Saxons she was also highly esteemed and the 
laws of King Ethelred not only exacted heavy damages from him 
who abstracted a neighbor's wife, but compelled him to provide 
his victim with another at his own expense. 



THE UPPER ENGADINE. 



7 



men in that furious struggle, till, their weapons 
gone, in the presence of impending slavery, they 
gave a keener edge to their despair by dashing 
their children in the faces of the enemy. 

While these wrongs abode in their memories 
it could hardly be expected that the Rseti would 
wear their yoke with much submission. In fact, 
they were always unruly and aggressive and, 
though well kept down, they never lost an oppor- 
tunity of giving vent to their feelings by robbery 
and havoc. Nevertheless, they gradually attained 
to a certain degree of civilization and even car- 
ried on quite an extensive trade with their neigh- 
bors to the south. They were finally overwhelmed 

Whether woman will ever regain, admission into that paradise 
from which " man, proud man^ drest in a little brief authority/' 
has since those palmy days excluded her, remains to be seen, 
though present signs point strongly towards her gradual recon- 
struction. In Boston she is already asserting with success her 
right to stand in the horse-cars, — a straw, perhaps, but highly 
significant in a community whose faintest ripple agitates all the 
shores of civilization, however far away. If he be wise, however, 
despite the portentous outlook, man will not hurry to meet the in- 
evitable, but act like ''a child o' the time,^' temporizing as adroitly 
as he may and cautiously compromising with the force of circum- 
stances, lest he be gradually beguiled into the surrender of every- 
thing that properly belongs to him. The note of warning has 
long been sounded. 

" Hippolito. Sir, I have often heard you say, no 
Creature liv'd in this isle, but those which man 
TTa* lord of ; why then should I fear ? 

Fros'pero. But here are creatures which I nam'd not 
To thee, who share man's sovereignty by 
Nature's laws, and oft depose him from it. 

Hip. What are those creatures, sir? 

Frosp. Those dangerous enemies of men, call'd women " 

(Old Play.) 



8 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



by the misfortunes that closed round the sinking 
empire. Lying directly in the path of the rapa- 
cious pagans who crossed the Alps for its destruc- 
tion, their country was long the prej^ of a succes- 
sion of plundering tribes, who marked their track 
with fire and sword, until the land was almost 
entirely depopulated. The Goths, the Huns, the 
Ostro-goths, the Alemanni, the Boioarii, all shared 
in its impoverishment, and each swarm, as it came, 
ravaged what its predecessors had spared. From 
ruin so total recovery was but slow, and hun- 
dreds of years elapsed, ere returning prosperity 
again clothed its fertile vales. During the convul- 
sions of those rude days Reetia was gradually dis- 
membered and divided among various powers. The 
canton of the Grisons came under the control of 
the dukes of Suabia, from whom, in the thirteenth 
century, it was transferred to the German Empire. 
In the fifteenth century its inhabitants entered 
into a compact among themselves for the assertion 
of their liberties arainst the tvrannv of their rul- 
ers and shortly after formed an independent al- 
liance with the other cantons. In this relation 
they continued till 1803, when they merged their 
fortunes in those of the present Swiss Confeder- 
acy. 

It is within a comparatively short period that 
the Upper Engadine^ has become popular, or even 

- The derivation of this word has often tested the skill of phi- 
lologists, who have lavished upon it their customarv learning and 
an ingenuity altogether exhaustless. To the German mind it has 



THE UPPER ENGADINE. 



9 



known to the world at large. As, previous to 
the year 1844, there was no road by which it 
could be reached on wheels without risking one's 

long suggested the deepest and most seductive researches, deserv- 
ing at least a hundred pages of fine print and frequently begetting 
as many. Though no definite result has thus far been reached 
and the real origin of the name is more uncertain than ever, yet 
the theories evolved have been highly creditable, both in quantity 
and in quality, to those who elaborated them. The earliest recorded 
evidence discovered up to this time is contained in a grant from 
Henry I., King of Germany, to a priest named Hartpert, which 
bears the date 930 and describes the region in question as Yallis 
Eniatina.'^ Whether this appellation may not have undergone 
sundry changes previous to the year cited is unknown, but if it 
did experience as many as it has subsequently and these could be 
ascertained, there would be a prolific opening for a much larger 
number of theories than have appeared even yet. In 967 we read 
"Ignadine ; " in 1040, Yallis Enica ; in 1116, Enadina ; " in 
1219, Angelina ; in 1239, " Engedina ; in 1256, Engedein ; " 
and so on, from which the untheoretic mind might reasonably 
infer that the natives themselves, having no philologists at hand^ 
found it hard to detect the truth. However this may be, philology 
has revealed a plausible method in all this long-descended madness 
in spite of apparent chaos. Erom the midst of each erratic com- 
bination its trained acuteness has been able to extract the vital 
root which has preserved the genealogy that alien consonants and 
superfluous vowels often bade fair to smother. It was apparently 
the scriveners of those ancient days, philology's most invidious 
and pertinacious foes, who were at fault, though one should not 
be too hard upon them, when one recalls the peculiar vagueness 
of spelling as then practiced, which was essentially phonetic. 
These worthies, having little sense, trusted almost wholly to 
sound when in the exercise of their profession and often followed 
their ears, which were very large, and thus it is not difficult to 
account for their want of progress. Moreover, the schoolmaster 
was generally abroad, or, if at home, found himself perplexed in 
the extreme for lack of a standard authority, dictionaries being as 
yet a myth ; Johnson and Webster slumbering in the womb of 
1* 



10 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



life, this fact is not hard to explain. Archdeacon 
Coxe, to be sure, did contrive to visit it a century 
ago, and came back unscathed, not ruffling so much 
as a hair of his exuberant vrig ; but neither the 
example of a great clerical dignitary on a mule, 
nor the three formidable volumes of which he was 
laboriously delivered soon after his return, tempted 
many to follow in his footsteps. And thus it long 
remained a sort of Ultima Tliule to travelers of 
all nations, while the few who dared its perils and 
hardships were regarded very much as we now 
look upon those who have journeyed through the 
Caucasus and climbed to the top of Mt. Elbruz. 
Its present fame is largeh^ due to the members of 
the Alpine Chib, who have pioneered the way to 
so many resorts before undiscovered. They be- 
gan to frequent the Upper Engadine about thirty 

time and all the elements of orthography being crude and unde- 
veloped to the last degree. Clerks are accountable for much, even 
on this side of the Middle Ages ; and those who recollect that the 
name of Shakespeare has been spelled in over twenty-five different 
ways within a century past, will be justified in the belief that they 
have hardly yet ceased to labor in their vocation. 

As to the actual source of the word Engadina,^^ we shall not 
probably err in attributing it to the Celts, who have left numer- 
ous and indubitable traces of their former occupancy in the names 
still clinging to the chief rivers, the mountain ranges and other 
prominent landmarks. We may naturally conclude that they 
favored the valley of the Inn in the same way, all the more that 
it abounds in noble and striking features, especially the stream 
itself, which at intervals expands into extensive lakes and lends a 
most impressive character to the whole region. Of this origin 
there are many indications, more or less definite, though there is 
neither space nor opportunity here to present them. 



THE UPPER ENGADINE. 



11 



years since in search of new peaks, passes, and 
glaciers, and from that time its popularity gradu- 
ally waxed greater and greater, though jMurray 
did not enlarge upon its myriad attractions till 
a somewhat later date. Now, all the villages of 
that territory are crowded with strangers in the 
season, while at Pontresina and at St. Moritz, its 
near neighbor, convenient rooms are almost unat- 
tainable. Naturally with this growing distinc- 
tion has come the usual and inevitable increase 
of prices, though comfort has followed in its 
train, since the inhabitants have had the wit to 
strengthen the basis of their prosperity by liber- 
ally anticipating the wants of modern tourists, 
shrewdly judging that these would be willing to 
pay therefor without much grumbling. Beside 
the ordinary visitors for pleasure numerous pa- 
tients, whose number yearly augments, are now 
ordered by the faculty to St. Moritz, where cha- 
lybeate springs burst forth, deliciously sparkling 
with electric friction to the palate and infusing 
puissant iron into broken constitutions, clamping 
together, as it were, their disjecta memhra^ as the 
Romans are alleged to have done when building 
their temples and coliseums. These waters are 
almost equal to those of Schwalbach as a tonic 
and restorative, while to the valley generally mul- 
titudes of invalids resort to test the air-cure, by 
inhaling that sovereign and reviving atmosphere 
which is regarded by many as the most bracing 
and invigorating south of the Arctic Circle. 



12 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



Yet, in spite of these advantages, the patrons of 
the Upper Engadine must always be less numer- 
ous than they would be by reason of its elevated 
and remote situation, which renders it less easy of 
access than most other parts of Switzerland and 
will probably always continue to do so. No rail- 
way could be built within its limits, except at an 
enormous expense, and it will doubtless ever be 
free from the despoiling and unscrupulous grasp of 
any stockholders of that class in whose incorpo- 
rate breasts exists no feeling for natural beauties. 
By the more cultivated portion of those who move 
from land to land this will not be regretted, as 
they are quite willing to suffer some few discom- 
forts in the effort to avoid the turmoil of the world, 
the rude maelstrom of daily life, while it hardly 
matters to those who travel in flocks and blindly 
follow the most popular routes. Hence the Enga- 
dine thus far has not been pervaded by those long 
trains of pernicious Cookeys " with their " cou- 
pons," aspiring though timid cockneys, who are 
daily caravaned over the continent in every direc- 
tion where an iron track can be laid, and whose 
desolating path is so often met elsewhere, and its 
inn-keepers are as yet rarely summoned to accept 
their little certificates of imbecility. The few of 
these that do make their appearance seldom stay 
beyond a day or two, being mostly persons whom 
nothing permanently impresses but a good dinner 
at a small price, and they are never seen again. 

Nature has endowed this lofty valley with a 



THE UPPER ENGADINE. 



13 



nine-months' winter, and to this, that the inhab- 
itants may have strength to endure it, she has 
added a buoyant and glittering atmosphere, piqu- 
ant with pungent life, and so clear that objects 
the most distant are vividly impressed upon the 
eye, which embraces an unwonted and almost infi- 
nite horizon. The long winter is succeeded by a 
short and brilliant summer of intense delight, the 
lovely child of a stern and forbidding mother ; a 
season that knows no torrid heats and which, in 
the esteem of those who have experienced its at- 
tractions, is so far raised above all others, that it 
might truly be styled a summer cum laiide. In 
our day we have been often and wisely taught 
that the very air we breathe may become a cordial 
of incredible virtue and many are alive to prove 
this. Old Thomas Fuller, that ancient and far- 
sighted worthy, understood it, when he wrote, 
" Chiefly choose a wholesome air, for air is a dish 
one feeds on every minute and therefore it need 
be pure." The opposite results that come from 
the tainted exhalations of large cities are well 
appreciated by multitudes of those who live in 
them amidst fevers and malaria, which to all ap- 
pearance are becoming ever more and more widely 
spread and more and more deadly, notwithstand- 
ing every means that skill and science can devise 
for their prevention. Let those who would real- 
ize the ardent life and vigor that air alone can 
bestow go to the Upper Engadine, and they will 
admit that the fullness of its efficacy was never 



I 



14 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



revealed to them before. As one walks, the very 
skin becomes sensible of a new pleasure, and feels 
a delicate nervous thrill from the rapid evapora- 
tion through innumerable pores which infects the 
whole frame. So quickly does the perspiration dis- 
appear, that it causes a perceptible glow, a titil- 
lation, a faint friction, as if from the slight touch 
of myriads of subtle fingers. With this unite the 
intense radiance of the sun, which illumines, but 
seldom unduly heats, — 

" Te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculse 
Nescit tangere ; tu frigus amabile 
Praebes/' — 

the wild, blue, spirit-like brightness of the sky ; 
the odors from the pines ; the lustrous greenness 
of the far-reaching meadows ; a glory of scenery 
that would elate the dullest soul ; and a new life 
seems to be suddenly born and to expand inimit- 
ably before one. 

" Le corps s'allege et il semble que la vie trouve a 
circuler dans les membres moins d'obstacle et de frotte- 
ment. L'organisme tout entier en devient plus elas- 
t'ique ; un repos d'une minute en vaut un de dix dans la 
plaine, Le corps etant plus leger, Fesprit est plus libre ; 
tout ce qui pouvait Tassombrir se dissipe comme par en- 
chantement ; plus de vaines preoccupations, plus de sou- 
cis, plus de tension, plus d'effort, et quelque soit le vent 
qui regne, qu'il amene, qu'il chasse des nuages, le ciel 
interieur est serein." ^ 

Though the climate of the Upper Engadine is so 

^ Les Plaisirs (Tun Grimpeur, par Eugene Rambert. 



THE UPPER ENGADINE. 15 

relentless and its altitude so great that snow gen- 
erally falls every month in the year and not even 
a potato can be coaxed to maturity; though it is 
really a little Siberia planted in the south of Eu- 
rope, yet pasturage is abundant and the herbage 
springs luxuriantly on the broad slopes that in 
every direction steal gently up to the very foot of 
the glaciers and precipices, unchecked by the sol- 
emn pines or larches which fringe them here and 
there. It is only by the help of this herbage that 
the peasantry manage to live and in comparative 
comfort, for it is thus that their dairies flourish 
with continual thrift. So rich and unstinted is 
the verdure, that the summer aspect of the fields 
suggests a far milder climate and greater fertil- 
ity than actually exists. On every side one sees 
a luxuriance of beauty. The grass is profusely 
mingled with flowers of every hue, brightening 
the calm, majestic lineaments of the landscape with 
ever fresh and ever varying expression. These 
are attended by the customary swarms of insect 
life which a quick instinct ever draws about them. 
Vivid butterflies, frail forms whose evanescent 
brilliancy casts but the shadow of a flickering 
shade, hover above blossoms only less gay than 
themselves ; gaudy flies flit to and fro, sipping all 
sweets ; crickets and grasshoppers cheerfully chirp 
from their ambush and bees add their soothing 
hum, — all uniting to form that subtle harmony, 
that music falling even from the brooding wings 
of silence, which is so grateful to the attentive 



16 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



ear. Yet nowhere is cultivation visible and the 
sight of ground well tilled, which so much in- 
creases the fairness of every landscape, however 
otherwise beautiful, here fails to soUcit the atten- 
tion. The common Italian saying, " Engadina 
terra fina, se non fosse la pruina," — the Enga- 
dine would be a fine country, were it not for the 
frost, — well shows the truth in a single line. 
Here and there in a sheltered nook, 

" Where some sweet bud of summer lies and dreams 
In its green cloister/' 

one notices a.n effort to raise a few hardy vegeta- 
bles, such as lettuce or other material for salad, 
but these touching endeavors are generally con- 
spicuous only by their failure, as well as by their 
rarity. They serve to impress upon the visitor the 
conviction that there is a liniit even to the swell- 
ing tide of verdure which expands around him, 
and to its suggestions of perennial youth and pro- 
ductiveness. 

Low as the temperature often becomes, and that 
in the longest days, it is never raw or chilly. One 
seldom, if ever, takes cold and the invigorating 
ether gives strength to bear much that might else- 
where be intolerable. The wintry weather never 
drives the blood from the extremities, as in other 
localities. The air is wonderfully dry and absorb- 
ent, even in a rain, and though the skies weep co- 
piously at times, the water quickly disappears and 
one is rarely, though in ailing health, prevented 
from walking for more than half a day. The very 



THE UPPER ENGADINE. 



17 



showers, like thirsty topers, appear to be always 
dry and a towel or sponge hung out in a sheltered 
spot will continue to lose its moisture, however 
fast everything around it may be dripping. 

Such are some of the more prominent features 
and peculiar fascinations of a region which com- 
mends itself ever more nimbly year after year to 
those who have once been drawn towards its mys- 
terious influences and who almost invariably con- 
tinue to offer it their allegiance, undaunted even 
by the repression of the elements, stern and strange 
though these are at times and unwonted in their 
aspect. 



CHAPTER 11. 



PONTRESINA. 

POXTEESIFA lies on either side of the road that 
leads by easy stages to the summit of the Bernina 
Pass. The population numbers about three hun- 
dred and for years the natives have not indulged 
their amour propre so far as to increase it percepti- 
bly. The place consists of less than fifty houses, 
which impress one as doing their best to throttle 
the highway for its presumption in entering the vil- 
lage confines and forthwith to degrade it from the 
safe and prosperous conduct of a Swiss pass into 
one of those evil communications that corrupt good 
manners. This solitary and unprotected street 
is narrow, dark and dubious ; angular as a chess- 
board, from the corners of the buildings thrust de- 
fiantly into it, and endowed with as much crooked- 
ness as can easily be compressed into a quarter of 
a mile. The reader of The Pilgrim's Progress " 
is reminded of the "little crooked lane " that came 
from " the country of Conceity It is not easy for 
the most gifted to achieve much distortion in so 
small an area, but the impartial observer will 
readily admit that the people of Pontresina, or at 
least their ancestors, have done their best with the 



PONTRESINA. 



19 



limited means at their disposal. Narrowness, how- 
ever, lies within the scope of the dullest mind and 
the most contracted compass. For their success in 
this field the natives deserve the appreciation of 
every visitor, and they very often receive it, since 
few persons from foreign lands ever pass through 
the village without giving vent to expressions, 
frequently quite emphatic, of cordial acknowledg- 
ment. In its own peculiar features it has rarely 
been equaled. To drive the length of the ave- 
nue without colliding with something or somebody 
would test the skill of a first-class whip, and as 
for looking from one end to the other, short as it 
is, one might as well try to see through a cornet- 
a-piston, or Mr. Ruskin's political economy. The 
authorities have not thus far bestowed any name 
on this interesting way, but in lieu thereof they 
have placed at either entrance a notice in some- 
what appalling characters, imposing a heavy fine 
on him who should dare to urge his horse at a 
pace faster than a walk. The object of this is 
to prevent contact with other vehicles, or with the 
edifices on either hand, but should any one be so 
rash as to go in for the fine, regardless of conse- 
quences, he would probably have to pay a further 
penalty de sa personne. 

The position of Pontresina, at an altitude of 
over 6000 feet, and girt round, as it is, on nearly 
every side by vast mountains, the princes of the 
Raetian Alps, makes it an admirable nucleus for 
excursions to spots which would be unapproach- 



20 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



able to many, were it not for such a starting point. 
The Roseg Glacier expands fan-like towards it and 
is a perpetual temptation, scarcely to be resisted 
by those who see the whiteness of its huge bergs 
standing out in bold relief against the glittering 
and boundless azure, the rudely sundered earth- 
crust, and the dark-browed evergreens through 
which it ponderously drags its massive form. The 
top of the Piz Languard, shooting up to a height 
of 11,000 feet, is also an undying wonder, and the 
view it offers of snow fields and Alpine crests in 
every direction is unsurpassed. These attractions, 
as well as others in the vicinity, are for the most 
part quite accessible, even to ladies, if they be pos- 
sessed of moderate strength and resolution, who 
can thus enjoy the semblance of danger without 
its reality, and thereby lend a helpful ornament to 
their speech and a lively flavor to their pens. 

Though its size is small, Pontresina, like the re- 
maining villages of the Upper Engadine, has an 
aspect of solid comfort and prosperity which the 
traveler seldom encounters elsewhere. Its houses 
are far superior to the low wooden cottages pecul- 
iar to other parts of Switzerland, which look as if 
a surprise party of aerolites had dropped in upon 
them and flattened them out, and which reveal 
themselves to the curious observer as so many 
dingy dens of darkness, packed with the blear-eyed 
children of poverty, choked with smoke, gasping 
for fresh air, and reeking with a strange medley of 
unsanctified exhalations. And they are no less 



PONTRESINA. 



21 



distinct in their architecture. Partly foreign, partly- 
ancient, altogether unique as to plan and construc- 
tion, the dwellings of the Engadine resemble noth- 
ing but themselves. Put together with a durabil- 
ity that promises to last forever, they seem to have 
been hollowed out of the imperishable rock of their 
own Alps, and one could easily imagine them to 
have descended from the ancestral R^ti. The 
Egyptians hardly built their " eternal abodes " for 
the dead more massively than were these reared for 
the living. Their walls are two feet thick, some- 
times three. The windows, especially those of the 
upper stories, are small and are generally provided 
with a double sash, which the severity of the cli- 
mate renders almost indispensable. The frames, 
of a quaint and venerable pattern, crown the apex 
of a little pyramid, horizontally expanding towards 
the street, and thus displaying the substantial 
strength of the stone-work. One is inevitablj^ re- 
minded of the embrasures of a fortress, and, in 
truth, if well-provisioned, any of these edifices 
would stand a long siege. This impression is con- 
firmed by the frequent iron bars and gratings be- 
fore the larger windows on the ground floor, which 
intimate troublous times in the past and burglars 
at present, though they are doubtless of Italian 
origin, and were probably copied with ambitious 
longings from grand mediseval palaces to the south. 
The inhabitants flatter themselves that these were 
originally designed to allow the pleasures of court- 
ship without risk to the weaker vessel. Though 



22 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



at present one encounters few maidens in the En- 
gadine who would seem to need this protection, 
yet in times long past the case may have been dif- 
ferent. The prehistoric woman may have been as 
beautiful as she is now unknown, and hard neces- 
sity may have constrained her guardians thus to 
bind her ''in misery and iron." But the recon- 
struction of the sex has made great progress in the 
Engadine, as will hereafter be shown, and such 
appliances are no longer necessary from any point 
of view. In fact, should this form of limited solic- 
itation again come into fashion, it is the man who 
would probably be behind the grating. So much 
for '' the higher education," as exemplified in the 
Engadine. 

The upper stories are for the most part void of 
the decoration just mentioned and their casements, 
on the contrary, are often hidden by pots of plants, 
which bloom with a luxuriance most creditable to 
the care bestowed upon them by the women, who, 
throughout the valley, have for many generations 
shown a natural taste for this pursuit. These 
hanging gardens make a brave show, and are all 
the more striking from the contrast with their 
cumbrous surroundings. Numerous windows in 
Pontresina are positively dazzling with the profu- 
sion of verbenas and fuchsias, geraniums, cinerarias 
and other flower-laden plants of equal brilliancy, 
which can always be successfully cultivated in an 
atmosphere untainted by gas or furnace heat. The 
display is also heightened by the neat coat of white- 



PONTRESINA. 



23 



wash which invariably covers every dwelling, so 
that their appearance is by no means so gloomy 
and forbidding as one might infer from their style 
and material. 

The interiors of these houses are plain to the 
last degree and almost barren in their simplicity. 
As to ornaments, they have few or none, and the 
furniture, of a quaint and ancient pattern, is for 
the most part composed of a few wall-benches 
with some stiff and angular chairs, the very aspect 
of which makes one sigh for the backbone of the 
fathers. To these, however, one should not fail 
to add two articles without which no housewife 
with any sense of her position would even attempt 
to hold up her head, an enormous stove covered 
with white glazed earthen-ware or porcelain and 
a sort of cupboard or wardrobe of hard wood still 
larger than the stove and generally ornamented 
with elaborate and tasteful carving. These are 
often kept in a family for centuries as heirlooms, 
and when time has darkened them into a ripe 
magnificence " they would be an enviable addi- 
tion to any house. Now that the furniture ma- 
nia is abroad in the land and a clawed table is 
nearly as much esteemed as a Claude picture, one 
of these rustic masterpieces would bring almost its 
weight in gold. Everything is invariably neat to 
excess and shines with that conscientious polish 
dear to the thrifty housekeeper. The walls are 
usually paneled and finished with the wood of 
the Cembra pine in its natural state, which re- 



24 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



quires neither paint to increase nor varnish to pre- 
serve its beauty, while its resinous emanations are 
both healthy and fragrant. From its delicately, 
tinted surface floats a faint aroma grateful to the 
sense, the blossom, as it were, of the all-pervading 
cleanliness which meets the eye wherever it rests 
and lends a certain refinement even to the home 
of poverty. 

The arrangement of the rooms, if arrangement 
it can be termed, has little regard for what we 
should call symmetry or convenience. One would 
infer that an architect would gain a scanty living 
in this locality. Rooms of all sizes and shapes 
are jumbled together and lead into or out of each 
other at hap-hazard. The stairs turn the most 
extraordinary corners and seem to conduct to any 
point but that for which they originally started. 
And yet the occupants somehow manage to keep 
comfortable in spite of every apparent hindrance. 
Their apartments are cool in summer, while dur- 
ing the winter, even when the thermometer with- 
out records twenty degrees below zero, an equa- 
ble temperature is preserved with the aid of the 
stoves above described, which give out an abunda>nt 
warmth, though consuming little fuel. The same 
roof often covers not only the family quarters, but 
the stable and granary as well. Occasionally one 
observes a pair of horses drawing a load of hay into 
the front door and through the kitchen on the way 
to its final destination. In many instances, how- 
ever, the barn is placed at one side of the house, 



PONTRESINA, 



25 



and then the proprietor gives such play to his airy 
fancies as the length of his purse will permit. If 
he be especially well-to-do in the world, the struct- 
ure bears ample evidence thereof. It is as large 
as a good-sized church and the wooden walls are 
soon tanned a reddish brown by the weather. In 
the sides tall Gothic windows, reaching to the 
broad and shadowy eaves, are cut with fantastic 
ingenuity, and through their delicate outline comes 
the ventilation by which the contents are preserved 
from must and dampness. Peering about with an 
eye for mental improvement, one discerns, beside 
the hay in huge heaps, a motley and venerable 
collection of carts, tools, sledges, grain sacks, hams, 
cheeses, and other special products of rural labor, 
while, very likely, high overhead, pendent from 
lines or rafters, the family washing crowns the 
prospect, like rows of arctic owls blinking in the 
dim twilight. 

Unattractive as the homes of the Engadiners 
may seem to many, they have some advantages 
which rarely belong to our own dwellings, and 
which, if they did exist, would be a blessing to 
landlords, giving them a surplus income, instead 
of an annual deficit, as now. These buildings 
never fall down and never need repairs — at least 
not oftener than once in a century or so. Their 
roofs do not require to be periodically slated, 
tinned, or tarred, since they are formed of heavy 
tiles or stout cedar planks, which do not decay 
and can never be blown off. As they have no 

2 



26 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



water-pipes, no pitiless plumber can prey on the 
hapless owners. As they never take fire, insur- 
ance costs little or nothing. The taxes are slight, 
and the more so that the primitive and old-fash- 
ioned villagers have not yet taken the pains to 
increase them which many more favored and more 
enterprising communities have displayed. From 
these facts it needs no ghost come from the grave 
to convince us that the possessor of real estate in 
Pontresina enjoys several privileges not vouchsafed 
to the majority of his class elsewhere. 

So far as regards the inhabitants, their lives are, 
as might be expected, quiet and uneventful, cen- 
tred in the sphere of common duties." Crime is 
nearly unknown among them and they are deeply 
and sincerely religious. Struggles, hard and long, 
for existence with a foe that never sleeps have 
engendered a sedate and steadfast self-reliance. 
They are honest and sober, industrious and patri- 
otic. Whether from lack of temptation or from 
the ice which their naturally cold temperament 
has led some to say flows in their blood, the youth 
of the Engadine are singularly free from the weak- 
nesses common to their age elsewhere. Their early 
years are almost as immaculate as those of the 
Prince Consort are alleged to have been by Sir 
Arthur Helps, St. Martin, and numerous other ex- 
plorers seeking for goodness in high places. They 
are characteristically attached to domestic pleas- 
ures, with which thej^ are never surfeited. Rep- 
robates like Cimon of old, — 



PONTRESINA. 



27 



" Who would at nights to Sparta often roam 
And leave his sister desolate at home," 

are unknown in the Engadine. Though there is 
actually a thin tincture of Spanish blood in their 
veins, a memento of the occupation of the Valte- 
line by King Ferdinand, intimating romantic nights 
and stolen sweets, which to this day is conspicuous 
in the physiognomy of certain families, one can 
now hardly imagine any young Engadiner playing 
the guitar by moonlight to a damsel, not even re- 
lated to him, behind a repulsive grating. For all 
such pernicious enjoyments the people have no 
taste. Like the English, they ''take their pleas- 
ures sadly " and do not lavish their mirth. Their 
amusements are as simple as their fare. Nothing 
can be more innocent than either. Ordinarily 
their dissipation consists of a glass of beer and a 
pipe ; on great occasions they add a petit verre of 
liqueur, or a cheap cigar, with a bit of white bread 
to give the feast an air of luxury. Fifty centimes 
enables them to cut a dash ; a whole franc repre- 
sents a spree. One is impressed with the self-con- 
tained mien, the respectability, heaped up and 
running over, which pervades every citizen. Not 
Mr. Pickwick himself, or his great rival, Mons. 
Prudhomme, ever manifested a more comfortable 
and easy content. It is impossible to avoid the 
inference of vast resources latent in the back- 
ground, where the foreground is so imposing. All 
this is permeated and rounded off, so to speak, by 
a certain egotism or local pride, arising from iso- 



28 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



lation, perchance, partly from a sense of desert. 
Not unfrequently one detects a frigid assumption 
of superiority quite Puritan in its tone. They 
would almost be mistaken for gentlemen, even in 
Boston, so great is the propriety of their deport- 
ment. At heart they are very exclusive, holding 
themselves aloof from " outside barbarians," as 
was the habit of the Japanese before the blessings 
of American civilization dawned upon them, and 
they are extremely jealous of intermarriage be- 
yond their own immediate communities. They 
have the name of being rude and discourteous to 
strangers, though Archdeacon Coxe says : " They 
bow to me as I pass in the readiest and most oblig- 
ing manner ; I am delighted with their manners, 
politeness, and hospitality ; " but an archdeacon is 
an archdeacon, wherever he may be, and an ex- 
alted being in an ample wig necessarily views 
mankind through a more serene and complacent 
medium than one who does not belong to the hie- 
rarchy and has merely his own hair apparent. 

Many of the peculiarities of the Engadiners 
are of ancestral origin. Never was a race more 
wedded to antiquity or more determined to stand 
fast by the ancient landmarks. The older fami- 
lies, especially when wealthy, are decidedly aris- 
tocratic. That of Saraz traces its descent to the 
Saracens, and thinks itself connected with the or- 
igin of Pontresina, the name of which, in deeds 
dating back as far as 1139, is given as Pons 
Sarisina." These belong to the class termed by 



PONTRESINA. 



29 



Gotthelf " des gens extremement bons et terrible- 
ment riches," as the owners of the " superbe ferme 
de Liebiwyl" were regarded by their neighbors. 
They are fully as much inclined to retreat into the 
past, as to press forward into the future. Habit, 
reverence, gratitude, all tend to deepen this feel- 
ing. They cherish old ideas and look askant at 
new ones. Every head is a museum well stored 
with fossil specimens, duly arranged, labeled and 
ready for instant use. A long line of precedents 
stretches back to the earliest ages. Life is to 
them a problem that has long been solved, a for- 
mula, following which the right use of a, 5, and 
c will inevitably lead to x. They do not care to 
keep abreast of the time. With them the brain 
has not attained an abnormal development, as in 
Boston. In Boston they would be thought de- 
cidedly illiterate. For ages they have been ab- 
sorbing ozone into their systems of the purest 
quality and in the greatest abundance, but to this 
day they are hardly aware of its existence. Of 
" heredity and its homogeneous elements " they 
are absolutely and deplorably ignorant, nor do 
they know aught of " aesthetic teas," nor are they 
wont to feed the intellectual flame at clubs of ad- 
vanced thought, where they might 

reason high 

Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute. 
And find no end in wandering mazes lost," 

like the first settlers in the realm of liberal ideas. 



80 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



For all these things, and for many others, prop- 
erly regarded as either the essential agents or the 
natural results of a broad and enlightened culture 
by those who would move the world from a phil- 
osophic stand-point, their bucolic minds care not. 
Their views of the conduct of life are limited to 
that common sense which is said to be engendered 
by their own placid pursuits, and on which subtle 
and unappreciated principles of selection have 
long taught them to rely with confidence.^ In 
these days, when everything not admitted to be 
hypothetical has at least been proved to be dubious, 
their simple faith is refreshing to witness. Once 
making inquiry of a native in regard to an inci- 
dent narrated by him, he replied, It is as true 
as preaching, for I saw it in the newspaper," 
meaning by the latter term an unsophisticated 
little weekly sheet published in the valley, and 
styled the " Fogl d'Engiadina." On another oc- 
casion, wishing to learn something concerning the 
character of a particular person, my informant 
said, Of course he is a good man, for he 's an 
officer in the bank at Chur," thereupon resting his 
case, obviously convinced that there was nothing 
more to be said. Their reasoning is not profound ; 
some might call it shallow, but they have proved 
it to be sound as far as it goes. They find much 
comfort in the proverb Le mieux est I'ennemi du 
bien." They rest on the foundation which their 

1 " L'agriculture produit le bon sens, et un bon sens d'une na- 
ture excellente." (Joubert.) 



PONTRESINA. 31 

forefathers laid. Wholly practical, it suffices for 
them, having been tested by centuries of experi- 
ence. From this source naturally flow the self- 
respect and sturdy independence bequeathed by 
an honorable origin, a noble and well-deserving 
ancestry, and a history of which none need feel 
ashamed. In politics they are sincerely and de- 
voutly republican, and one of their popular prov- 
erbs asserts that after God and the sun the sim- 
ple citizen is the supreme power in the Enga- 
dine." Their autonomy was an accomplished fact 
even before the discovery of America, and the 
vitality they then infused into its intrepid youth 
quickened the lofty triumph of its manhood, and 
has ever imbued its old age with the vigor that 
comes from high aims and a pure ambition. To 
the principles first proclaimed and defended, they 
have ever been true to the last of their blood and 
their breath. Sterile their soil, unassuming their 
lives, humble their occupation ; but lasting pros- 
perity has resulted from their labors, and their 
worthy record- impresses one as the fitting out- 
growth of their majestic surroundings. They are, 
as it were, the peers of their own Alps, and the 
incessant battle against the encroachments of these 
and against every form of elemental warfare, as 
well, has stamped upon them a certain grandeur, 
the result of many a rude contest and of unending 
vigilance. With this long probation has grown up 
a dogged endurance, a sturdy pluuk, which have 
long been characteristic of their race, and which 



32 



GLEAXIXGS FROM PONTRESIXA. 



enable them still to face undannted the mighty 
passions of nature, and to look with calmness on 
her terrible devastations. Courage, honesty, mo- 
rality, economy, are modest virtues, but they are 
leavened vrith a life that never dies. These still 
bear the fruit which time has made abundant, a 
tardy grovrth at first, but, once ripe, enduring for 
ao'es, blessino; and blessed. Over a centurv ao:o 
De Mehegan vrrote of the Engadine, ''La habite 
un peuple, simple, bien faisant, brave, ennemi du 
faste, ami du travail, ne cherchant point d'esclaves 
et ne voulant point de maitres." The eulogy he 
then bestowed upon its inhabitants they still de- 
serve, and it should be the earnest wish of every 
lover of his race that they may continue so to do. 
Such victors should be cherished and their unas- 
suming conflict should be held in perpetual honor 
and remembrance. 

If there be one quality that distinguishes the 
Engadiners more than any other, it is their econ- 
omy. For luxury they have no taste. It is both 
unknown and unsought among them, nor is it ever 
regarded as the ultimate aim of an honest and 
laborious career. The self-denial everywhere ob- 
served is extraordinary. Their household expenses 
are as small as their pleasures are simple, and even 
in a country like Switzerland, where each one is 
driven to exercise the strictest frugality, they are 
conspicuous for their thoughtful thrift ^ and for the 

1 As among the people of the United States, who are more ex- 
travagant and wasteful than any yet known, this word is seldom 



PONTRESINA. 



33 



prosperity which has been assured through the 
small savings thence accruing. Their course in 
this respect has been dictated not merely by the 

used and still less understood, I venture to append, pro bono publico, 
a short extract from an admirable work by Samuel Smiles, enti- 
tled Thrift. The author certainly has the welfare of his race at 
heart, if any man ever did, and has often proved it. If we were 
really conscious of our own best interests, and were as thoughtful 
of the future as we should be, we should pass a law requiring these 
sentences^ or their equivalents, to be printed on every banknote 
issued in the land, before it became a legal tender : — 

" Thrift means private economy. It includes domestic economy, 
as well as the order and management of a family." 

" It is the savings of individuals that compose the wealth — in 
other words the well-being — of a nation. On the other hand, it 
is the wastefulness of individuals which occasions the impoverish- 
ment of states. So that every thrifty person may be regarded as 
a public benefactor, and every thriftless person as a public en- 
emy." 

Our own great apostle of thrift, the sensible and far-sighted 
Franklin, said that he would die the more willingly, could he but 
return at the end of a century and take note of our progress. If 
this longing were now to be graiitied, he might regret that he had 
not rested quietly in his grave, though the shrewd wisdom that in- 
spired '^Poor Richard," doubtless enabled him to forecast the fut- 
ure to a certain extent, by revealing the natural issue of a weak- 
ness which, even in his day, was everywhere apparent. This 
extravagance seems to have been a national characteristic from 
the earliest times, and the very institutions we first adopted have 
fostered it, until it now bids fair to become incurable. Mr. Tick- 
nor, in his diary, gives the minutes of a conversation with Talley- 
rand, who spent several months in the United States, near the 
beginning of this century. He said, C'e^t un pays remarquable, 
mais ieur luxe, leur luxe est affreux." La Kuchefoucauld-Lian- 
court in his Voijage dans Les Etats Unis d'Ameriqiie,fait en 179.5, 
1796 et 1797, writes: " Le luxe y est tres-anime, surtout a New 
York et a Philadelphie, et il y fait annuullement des progves ef- 
frayants." Mrs. Kemble, in her Records of a Girlhood, observes, 
2* 



84 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



natural desire of people of slight means to pro- 
vide for tliemselves and their families, but still 
more by an inborn habit of mind which teaches 
them to look with horror on a state of dependence 
and to do all in their power to avoid it. The possi- 
bility of such a result, which, situated as they are, 
can never be entirely beyond their contemplation, 
gives their faces a serious cast, even from their 
earliest infancy, while it impregnates their cliarac- 
ters with a certain stern and striking hardness, 
and a disdain for everything flighty, or superficial. 
From this has also come a homely wisdom or 
mother-wit, which is all-pervading as a line of con- 
duct, and which, as has often been noticed in small 
communities, is finally of greater benefit than tal- 
ent or than genius itself. Thus it has happened 
that, notwithstanding inevitable anxieties for the 

" Americans are the most extravagant people in the world." Mr. 
B. A. Gould, once master of the La^tin School in Boston, a man of 
great ability and sound sense, refers in the Prize Book, for 1820, 
to the unnatural current of wealth which for many years has 
been pouring into our coffers, and which has brought with it a de- 
gree of extravagance in living as incompatible with our future 
prosperity, as it is unreasonable in its demands and unsatisfying 
in its effects.'^ Similar extracts might be given ad libitum, but 
these will suffice to show the real opinions of all right-minded peo- 
ple on this subject. A short time since I heard the remark, " I 
hate the very word economy ; I thought it wicked and atrocious, 
and I much doubt whether any person would dare to utter such 
a sentiment in another land than our own. And yet it is hardly 
an exaggeration to say that, at heart, many of our people would 
give it their approval. If our course in this respect be not 
changed, it needs no prophet to predict our inevitable and perma- 
nent ruin. 



PONTRESINA. 35 

future, they have sundry fixed rules and motives, 
in which the observation of ages has led them to 
confide as th^^ sources of success ; and so sure are 
they that these will inevitably advance the well- 
being to which they have always tended, that they 
generally consider one reduced to helplessness by 
apparent ill-luck, — for even with them a case like 
this now and then occurs, — as wanting in moral 
tone and attribute his failure in life to this defect 
rather than to misfortune. In other words, they 
opine that principles really good would have kept 
ruin, if not poverty, at a distance. And this view, 
I apprehend, will be found correct in the great 
majority of similar instances everywhere. It is 
particularly warranted among a people limited as 
to numbers and resources, where the duties and re- 
sponsibilities of every citizen are far more plainly 
set before him, and, through their effects, are much 
more quickly and clearly realized, than in a richer 
and more populous settlement. In such a society 
the condition of every member is closely linked to 
that of his neighbor. The loss of each individual 
is in a measure that of all, while the gain of one 
indisputably promotes the general good, and he 
must be willfully and deliberately recreant to the 
common weal, no less than to his own, who ignores 
the rules which ages have proved to be essential to 
the public welfare. 



i 

i 



CHAPTER III. 



PONTEESIKA. 

The villages of the Engadine are well pro- 
vided with free schools, in which the elementary 
branches are well and thoroughly taught. For 
many generations no one unable to read has been 
permitted to partake of the sacrament. The pu- 
pils are not crammed with a surfeit of superficial 
parrotry, as in some other lands. The system is 
excellent, though neither complicated nor expen- 
sive. A salary of five hundred francs per annum 
suffices to secure a teacher able to impart all the 
instruction that is with them thought necessary or 
desirable. This was the emolument conferred upon 
Herr Tzschucke at the time of my visit for that 
service. He was a hard-working, conscientious 
pedagogue, who did his best for his pupils during 
the winter, while in summer he sought to increase 
his means by serving as waiter at a hotel. 

As might be imagined, this happy valley is the 
paradise of nervous persons, and the inhabitants 
may in truth be said to hardly know of the exist- 
ence of any nerves whatever. Their tranquil, 
sober lives move on with little of that social wear 
and tear of mind and body, or of that exposure to 



PONTRESINA, 



37 



temptation, which are common to poor humanity 
in other localities. Since they for the most part 
inherit a contented disposition, this fertile source 
of comfort is always present, while the close and 
daily contemplation of nature, when in repose, 
tends to calmness and the repression of all emo- 
tion. So imjoassive are they, that to judge simply 
from externals, one could scarcely tell whether the 
guests were returning from a wedding or a funeral. 
Once, at a ball, I saw the young people dance with 
a sort of penitential perfunctory zeal, as if deter- 
mined to do their duty, whatever might betide, 
but this, erelong, evaporated, and they remorse- 
fully promenaded, evidently regarding the whole 
thing as a delusion, " a thrashing the water and a 
raising of bells," as it were. It is said, however, 
that in winter, when critical spectators are no 
longer present, the Engadiners are correctly gay, 
and abandon themselves to every form of social 
festivity with a briskness that would be quite as- 
tounding to their summer guests. 

The Engadiners never appear to be very young 
or very old. They generally impress one as having 
a middle-age air. Long before the end of their 
second decade the shadow of the future already 
seems to rest upon them, and after they have 
quitted their prime they cling to youth with a 
persistent conservatism which dislikes to surrender 
anything, even the past. In spite of all the helps 
to longevity which seem to wait upon them from 
their very infancy, one seldom or never meets with 



38 



GLEAXIXGS FROM POXTRESINA. 



a person of either sex advanced in years. At a 
certain period thej^ suddenly slirivel up, till little 
remains but their silhouettes, and then ultimately 
disappear. Perhaps length of days is distasteful 
to them ; perhaps life is too cumbersome to be 
longer *borne : or the profusion of ozone may un- 
dermine their constitutions ; or the cold and the 
dryness of the air may wear them out with a slow, 
yet unseen friction. From whatever cause, old age 
has never been a chronic complaint in the Enga- 
dine, and the natives rarely die of it. An abiding 
sense of this fact may, perchance, have something 
to do with their general bearing. Every citizen 
has the aspect of un homme range," and his dig- 
nity and gravity of demeanor quite suflBce to show 
that he is aware of the responsibilities of life. A 
peculiar phlegm is noticeable in all they do or say. 
All colloquial tendencies, if any such ever show 
signs of development, are promptly repressed. The 
very women are somewhat taciturn and think twice 
before they speak once, an excellent thing in 
woman," and fruitful of admirable results. The 
men talk but little and with slow deliberation. 
" Pen de paroles et beaucoup de sens," as Fred- 
erick the Great remarked of Tacitus. They are 
sparing even of their breath, and after having 
amassed an idea do not cast it recklessly away. 
They rarely gesticulate, but when they do so, each 
gesture is weighted with significance. Its mis- 
sion being fulfilled, it is abruptly discharged from 
farther service. They are neat in their persons 



PONTRESINA. 



39 



and in their habits. Like the monarch of Israel, 
they are ''pious, good, and clean." The working 
classes in the Engadine are not so malodorous as 
they are frequently elsewhere on the Continent, 
unless after long and sudorific labor. Probably 
their bodies are purified by the vigorous atmos- 
phere that is alwaj'S about them, and this will 
account for the advantage they thus have over 
the rest of their fellow-countrymen, whose pres- 
ence is often recognized by another sense than that 
of sight, as Dr. Johnson said he detected his friend 
Bozzy in the darkness of Edinburgh. The gait of 
the Engadiners is heavy and non-committal to the 
last degree. It is in striking contrast with the im- 
petuous and bustling eagerness of city life. " Has- 
ten slowly," is evidently their motto. Every step 
is taken as if it had been the subject of much 
thought and was an investment not to be made 
without reflection. In this matter, as in numerous 
others, such as their cleanliness, the white neatness 
of their well-kept houses, their apparel, their gen- 
eral thrift, their fondness for flowers, their fat, 
sleek cattle, they much resemble the Hollanders 
at the other end of the Rhine. They might with 
no little truth be styled the Dutch of Switzerland, 
and thus is afforded an odd illustration of the old 
saying that '' extremes meet." 

The Engadiners consider marriage more like a 
partnership in business than we are wont to regard 
it. Yet the relation is ordinarily a happy one, 
though love-ma.tches are not common, and the 



I 



40 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



dowry is an essential feature, for economical con- 
siderations can never be ignored.^ They quite 
agree with the thrifty sentiment of Leddy Grippy, 
Tak' my word o' experience for 't, my man, — a 
warm downseat 's o' far mair consequence than 
the sill}^ low o' love.'' With them the wife holds 
her own, all the more from her contribution to the 
family expenses. In many instances she is the 
actual head of the administration, the prime min- 
ister, so to speak ; not only preaching, but practic- 
ing ; doing most of the mental labor, and magnify- 
ing her office by a general superintendence, both 
in-doors and out. It is by no means rare, that she 
is her husband's superior in manners, habits, tact 
and intelligence. As it is vulgarly said, " The 
hen is the better bird." This enterprise now and 
then assumes large proportions. A few years ago 

Mme. was left a widow with eight children 

and a moderate fortune. As to the former, she 
did not throw them at the English and other in- 
vaders, like her primitive and unsophisticated an- 
cestors, but gave them a liberal education with an 

1 Lassie, lassie ! exclaimed the Leddy, if ye live to be a 
grandmother like me, ye 'il ken the right sense o^ a lawful and 
tender affection. Bat there ^s no sincerity noo like the auld sin- 
cerity, when me and your honest grandfather, that was in mine, 
and is noo in Abraham's bosom, came thegither — we had no 
foistring and parley-vooing, like your novelle turtle-doves — but 
discoursed in a sober and wise-like manner anent the cost and 
charge o' a family ; and the upshot was a visibility of solid cor- 
diality and kindness, very different, Beenie, my dear, frae the 
puff-paste love o' your Clarissy Harlots/' (Leddy Grippy, in The 
Entail.) 



POXTRESIXA. 



41 



eye to the future. Her funds she invested in a 
laro-e hotel in a thrivino^ vilWe near her birth- 
place. This she managed with such ability, that 
two summers since she built another establishment 
of vast size at St. ]\Ioritz, into which she put 
750,000 francs. A similar instance of capacity and 
energy has been lately displayed at Pontresina, 
though not on a scale quite so grand. The suc- 
cessful conduct of a hotel in the Engadine implies 
more than most are wont to suppose, and is a de- 
cided tribute to the abilities of any person. It 
demands not only abundant capital, but adminis- 
trative faculties of a high order, by no means the 
least of which are tact and a knowledge of human 
nature, which woman often possesses in a greater 
degree than man, and which, when money is lack- 
ing, do no little to supply its place. The neces- 
sary provisions for a hotel of the first class in the 
Engadine of themselves need incessant care and 
forethouoiit. Xothins; can be D:ot in the vicinitv. 
The supplies demanded by the luxurious tourist in 
our time, 

The mealy potatoes and marrowfat pease, 

The honev and butter and Simmenthal cheese/'' 

and nearly everything else, must be procured, and 
that daily, from points very remote. Meat is ob- 
tained at Zurich, Chur, and at other localities 
many miles away over steep passes. The fish 
comes packed in ice from the German Ocean : the 
vegetables from Parma, Modena, or other towns in 
Italy. Even the poultry is of foreign extraction. 



42 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



Chickens are freqiientlj^ brought alive in large 
coops over the Bernina Pass, and then scattered 
here and there in the yalley to fatten on the mul- 
titudinous grasshoppers that enliven the fields. 
This will, undoubtedly, account for the extraordi- 
nary manner in which they have zigzagged into 
wings and spindled out into innumerable and at- 
tenuated drumsticks, by the time they appear on 
the table. With a little aid from the hotel keep- 
ers, habit has, doubtless, gradually grown into an 
instinct, and the chickens have adapted themselves 
to circumstances with a sagacity almost Darwin- 
ian. 

By no means the least attraction of the Enga- 
dine is its freedom from pauperism. One is never 
solicited by beggars, and the very few really indi- 
gent persons within its limits keep themselves 
carefully in the background and nourish their 
woes with a sense of propriety. A man in rags 
is never seen, and not only are all the people well 
clothed, whatever their position, but they have a 
plump, well-fed mien, as if food were not at all 
scanty, which is the fact ; it is also substantial and, 
in the well-to-do families, of good quality, though 
seldom displaying great variety. The less pros- 
perous class subsist on a diet of few sorts, and 
their cuisine is of the most primitive and element- 
ary description. Solidity is essential, above every- 
thing, and they will always choose such aliment 
as stands long by them, like the Irish peasantry, 
who prefer to have their national fruit underdone, 



PONTRESINA. 



43 



" with a bone in it," as they say, that they may 
make the most thereof, while it lasts. Fresh meat 
is not plenty, but there is no scarcity of beef slight- 
ly salted and then dried in their desiccating atmos- 
phere, which soon reduces it to the consistency of 
an ancient Pharaoh, and the mummy of old Seno- 
feru himself could hardly appear less digestible 
or nutritious, than one of these lean, cadaverous, 
misshapen lumps of animal anatomy, over which 
the humbler classes hover with greedy anticipa- 
tion. Luckily, stern necessity has made the teeth 
of the Engadiners very powerful and equal to 
every demand for tenacious mastication, while as 
to digestion, the bracing air of their valley would 
enable them to reduce the nether millstone itself 
to its original elements. As to the bread, it is of 
the same unyielding temper as the meat. Though 
certainly nutritious, it is but little tempting to 
one who does not make copious allowance for this 
merit. The loaves are hard and dark, tough and 
close-grained, and most of my readers will accept 
this statement without contradiction, on learning 
that these are baked but once in three or four 
months, when a great oven is heated for the pur- 
pose. Towards the end of this period they can be 
dismembered only by a strong arm wielding a 
sharp axe, and many would be excused for the 
belief that they had been left behind by the orig- 
inal settlers, and that the present inhabitants were 
eating their way through them from a conscien- 

^ tious horror of waste. The bread is mitigated by 

I 

I 



44 GLEAXIXGS FROM POXTRESINA. 



the aid of cheese, also more or less antique and im- 
pressive to a sensitive nature, and of butter, made 
in a kind of rough fashion on the upper pastures 
during the summer and packed in bottles for the 
use of future generations. In addition to these 
absolute necessaries of life, a sour wine from the 
Valteline at the farther extremity of the Bernina 
Pass is quite common and very popular, though 
none but a vrell-tanned throat can drink it without 
strong self-control. This bright effluence of sunny 
Italy keeps for many years, and in our own coun- 
try would probably retain its whole body for ages 
without diminution. Among the best families of 
Pontresina I was told that casks of the " Yino 
Yaltelino " had even been preserved for over fifty 
years, and they were still preserving it when I 
left. 

All through the Engadine the land is pretty gen- 
erally divided among the peasantry, who for the 
most part own the farms on which they live, though 
the extent of their holdings varies greatly. The 
farmer is essentially a child of the soil and man- 
ages to extract his support therefrom almost en- 
tirely. The inn-keeper supplies him with the few 
articles he needs, such as coffee, sugar and the 
like, for household consumption. If he has ten or 
a dozen cows and land enough to keep them in 
good condition, he is thought to be prosperous and 
his vote is worth inspection. The 23ig is more 
numerously represented than any other animal, 
except the goats, and is all the more popular from 



1 

i 



PONTRESINA. 



45 



the slight cost of his support. The winter he 
spends in unobtrusive retirement, being fed chiefly 
on a rank and coarse dock that grows very abun- 
dantly in the neighborhood, and of which great 
quantities are salted down for this purpose during 
the hot months. In June all the swine of the vil- 
lage are sent up en masse with the cattle to the 
high Alps for the rest of the season. Here they 
ramble about amidst the sublimest scenery, con- 
sume the whey rejected by the butter and cheese, 
and gain what little fat their peculiar structure 
will permit them to carry down on their return 
in the fall. Being thus no longer demoralized by 
the enfeebling seductions of man, and free to 
gratify his own natural tastes, which are dainty 
rather than otherwise, piggy proves that he is 
neat in his person and select in his diet, which an 
inquisitive temperament prompts him to seek in 
remote and secluded spots. He shows plainly that 
he does not prefer to wallow in the mud, or to eat 
garbage. Whey is the only flesh-pot for which 
he hankers, and this he considers in the light of a 
stimulant ; a relic, so to speak, of an effete civili- 
zation, from which he has taken a new and healthy 
departure. 

The pig of Pontresina is not as other pigs. 
Even in the fullness of his growth he offers but 
slight resemblance to the bloated bondholder wel- 
tering in his own ponderosity generally seen else- 
where, which, when in England, the shrewd and 
quick-witted Taine promptly recognized as the 



46 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



type of the representative Briton, — portly, pomp- 
ous, plethoric, the perpetual diner, the trencher- 
companion of unbounded capacity, ^'animal prop- 
ter convivia natumy ^ His shape, in truth, is not 
at all after this model, nor does his hue of a rusty 
chestnut, variously streaked and shaded, recall the 
popular ideal. As to his form, it has, doubtless, 
resulted from the peculiar necessities of his mount- 
ain life, and his color is due to the same cause. 
The legs of the Pontresina breed are long and so 
are their bodies, which are very slender, while the 
ribs never lie softly latent under the summer's har- 
vest, but are prominently apparent to the most 

1 This may be regarded as an edifying result of those " bloody 
instructions which return to plague the inventor/' since the pig is 
indebted almost wholly to the English for his present aspect of car- 
nal sensuality in an obese and shapeless mass of fat. Having cru- 
elly deprived him of his prerogative of natural selection and of 
several other inalienable rights which would have led to far differ- 
ent issues, they have ended by making him as tame as a Quaker, 
though in his native state he was as independent as a Zulu and 
more ungovernable than an Irishman. Under their supervision, 
like many others heretofore subject to their control, he has thus 
been demoralized beyond all telling and now offers a most apt ex- 
ample of the survival of the un-fittest. 

Mr. Euskin, whose comprehensive acuteness nothing but total 
non-entity could ever hope to escape, has even detected in this con- 
nection a certain weakness on the part of his particular idol. He 
observes that " Turner could pigs draw better than any other ani- 
mal,'' — a sentence, by the way, admitting a double construction 
and curiously recalling the great master's own " supra grammati- 
cam " use of his vernacular,- — and farther alludes to this feature as 
" one of Turner's specially English (in the humiliating sense) points 
of character." This is rather severe on an artist so choice in 
his pigments," as Mr. Trimmer declares Turner to have been. 



PONTRESINA. 



47 



careless observer. Altogether they are picturesque, 
rather than beautiful, and, like Cassius, have a 
lean and hungry look, as if haggard with the in- 
cessant friction of repressed emotions and aspira- 
tions never to be realized. Yet there is nothing 
morbid about them, and on their native heath 
their movements are nimble and sprightly. From 
their snouts, upturned with a defiant air, issue 
sounds sonorous with that gruff independence 
which their republican compatriots so often be- 
stow upon their foreign visitors. These they, pre- 
sumably, acquired from protracted and careful 
study, for neither their pendent and vigilant ears, 
nor their sharp and crafty eyes, are ever off duty. 
There seems to be no drawback to their enjoy- 
ment. 1 have many a time watched these frisky 
sybarites capering to and fro, hilarious in the sun- 
shine, with their queer little, twisted, glittering 
tails drawn out into finical and elaborate diminu- 
endoes, like the trills of a prima donna assoluta. 
Yet they never forget their sense of propriety, and 
when the finale comes, they do not die viva voce, 
rending the sky with their discordant protesta- 
tions, as in our own rural districts, but steal away 
with a subdued grace equally creditable to them- 
selves and to their friends. And so the end crowns 
the work. 

Mountain life seems especially to agree with the 
pig, and none the less that the dwellers in such 
localities invariably manifest a friendly concern in 
his behalf. The greater the altitude, the closer is 



48 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



the apparent intimacy between him and his pa- 
trons. In The Indian Alps, and How we Crossed 
them/' the writer, describing DarjeeHng, high up 
among the Himalayas and many thousand feet 
above the sea-level, observes, " A pig to these hill 
tribes is not the loathsome, unholy, unclean quad- 
ruped it is in the estimation of the Mahomedan 
and Hindoo, but their much respected brother, 
with whom in life they love to fraternize and in 
due time, when slain, to eat." 

Strangers who visit this primitive region nat- 
urally meet with many things that strike them as 
droll and funny, though, it is safe to say, these 
never reveal themselves to the natives in that 
sense, least of alh as in anv wav tendino; to excite 
laughter. This might well be expected both from 
their isolation and from the innate sobriety of 
their lives. The people hate to leave the old ortho- 
dox ruts. New lights are odious to them, and they 
still continue to look at the world through smoked 
glass, as it were. To them a pig is a pig, and it is 
nothing more, until its increased size has entitled 
it to a more suggestive and appropriate name. 
They would consider A. Ward a buffoon ; Mark 
Twain would reveal himself as a maniac pur et 
simple ; while Henry Ward Beecher would seem 
an irreverent radical ripe for the pit. Nothing in 
all their lives is calculated to breed mirth, or to 
enable them to appreciate anything but the seri- 
ous aspects of their existence. One never detects 
a trace of that quick sense of the ridiculous, that 



PONTRESINA. 



49 



crude rustic wit, that grim humor, dry and quaint, 
flickering for an instant and then vanishing like 
a will-o'-the-wisp in a swamp, which we perceive 
so commonly among our own country people, and 
by which the dullness of their situation is so much 
lessened. A facetious man in Pontresina would 
be sadly out of his element, and, indeed, might 
think himself lucky, if he were not indicted for 
maintaining a nuisance on his premises. The 
neighbors would look askant at him as something 
uncanny, if not worse, and whenever he attempted 
to scintillate would fly from him, as from the frag- 
ments of an exploding shell. Ultimately, they 
would succeed in ridding themselves of him by 
some means, fair or foul, without allowing him 
time to explain so much as, " Why is this thus ? " 
Should the rash experimenter go so far as to illus- 
trate or emphasize his humor by a tap on the 
shoulder, it would be resented as an insult, all the 
more that here, as everywhere else on the Conti- 
nent, the person is peculiarly sacred and possesses 
certain well-defined rights never to be disregarded, 
even in the way of a joke. An Engadiner sees 
little difference between a tap on the shoulder and 
a box on the ear. 

So far as money is* concerned, the people of the 
Engadine are in easier circumstances than those of 
any other agricultural section of Switzerland, and 
the comfort thence ensuing is more equally dis- 
tributed than elsewhere. This state of things has 
not arisen solely from their thrifty habits, but is 



50 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



largely due also to a spirit of enterprise which they 
have long possessed, and which is a quality that 
one would be slow to attribute to them in the face 
of so much apparent apathy, though were it not 
for this they could hardly live, so very limited are 
their natural resources. The better class among 
them are supported almost entirely on the profits 
acquired in foreign lands, the results of a long ex- 
patriation from home and kindred, devoted to hard 
work and to an incessant hoarding of small sums. 
For many generations it has been the custom of 
the young men to resort to distant countries in 
search of a competency that the place of their 
birth could not provide. Their hopes are not on a v 
grand scale, but are confined to the moderate gains 
necessary for their daily wants and for the acquisi- 
tion of the little fortune that will enable them ul- 
timately to return to their own valley and pass 
their remaining days in peace. All the Swiss have 
been wanderers from time immemorial and that 
perforce, since their teeming race could never 
otherwise have lived. Formerly, having fought 
nobly in behalf of their own emancipation, they 
entered the service of foreign princes, as valiant 
mercenaries. In this relation they were ever true 
to the trust reposed in them and to every soldierly 
requirement. No men could have died more hon- 
orably than those who fell in the defense of Louis 
XVI. at the Tuileries, that worthy band whose 
fate was so well immortalized by the genius of 
Thorwaldsen through the magnificent Lion of Lu- 



PONTRESINA. 



51 



cerne. The Engadine had its share in the glories 
of that Thermopylae and her people look back 
upon it with pride. 

In later days this avenue to fame and fortune 
was closed, and the descendants of heroes were 
driven to other and humbler positions for support, 
though the gains from these have been more cer- 
tain and more peacefully obtained. As confec- 
tioners, cooks and pastry-cooks, keepers of res- 
taurants, manufacturers and vendors of liqueurs, 
and in some other capacities, the citizens of the 
Engadine have learned how to thrive, not only in 
every part of Europe, but even in Chicago, San 
Francisco, Australia, and in other quarters quite as 
remote. In the first two of the pursuits I have 
named hereditary skill has made them more suc- 
cessful than in the others, while family interest 
has often given them a better start in the world. 
As many as a tenth part of the able-bodied youths 
thus annually migrate. The popular belief of the 
rest of Europe, embodied in the stinging prov- 
erb, "Point d'argent, point de Suisse," imputes 
this habit to greed of money, but it is really the 
offspring of stern necessity. No people are more 
patriotic than they, or would more gladly seek an 
honest livelihood at their own hearthstones. But 
the pressure is strong upon them, and the stronger 
in proportion to their horror of poverty and de- 
pendence. None can understand except those who 
have been through it, how hard is the struggle to 
extort a living from such a soil and such a climate, 



52 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 

as are encountered in the higher Alpine villages. 
What patient and depressing labor, what suffer- 
ings, what endless sacrifices, what baflBed hopes — 
all in the presence of possible poverty from causes 
beyond human control — must be experienced in 
order to build up even an existence in those relent- 
less abodes of ice and snow ! No wonder that in 
some of the more gloomy gorges despair at times 
blackens the lives of those who inhabit them and 
casts a shadow of thick darkness over their future. 
Though the Engadine is spared such misery as 
this, and the average of happiness is much greater 
than in most other valleys, yet there are many 
who, for various reasons, are obliged to cling to 
their homes, and of these not a few are of limited 
means. Naturally their condition is strongly con- 
trasted with that of those who have returned suc- 
cessful from their various " El Dorados " and are 
the owners of the largest and handsomest houses. 
These are the aristocracy of the place, and in Pon- 
tresina, as elsewhere, one sees before him frequent 
proofs that this term, albeit unrepublican, is not 
ill-applied, especially when he reflects on the ster- 
ling qualities needed to achieve such a position 
and the genuine manliness and strength of char- 
acter that must have been displayed. Nowhere 
could one find a more pregnant illustration of the 
saying of Sallust, that Each man is blacksmith 
to his fate." 

I know not if it be generally true that much 
cooking makes men grave, but it certainly has not 



PONTRESIXA, 



63 



had a frivolous effect on those of the Engadiners 
who have devoted themselves to it, for they are 
fully as staid and solemn in their port and mien 
as the rest of their compatriots, perhaps a trifle 
more so. Their great chef, Brillat-Savarin, ob- 
served that he vras " voue par etat a des etudes 
serieuses," while from his " Meditations sur la 
Fin du Monde, and other substantial and sepul- 
chral meats bequeathed by him to an admiring 
world, we are led to infer that cooks ponder 
deeply while they stew. Naturally, an artiste of 
a reflective temperament would seek to magnify 
his ofl&ce, when he thought of the important part 
it holds in human affairs. Even the mighty genius 
of Napoleon admitted that ^' the stomach rules the 
world," and no one knew better than he that when 
this organ is deranged, the brain is compelled to 
abdicate its throne, at least temporarily. Many 
dumplings of condensed wisdom have originated 
in the kitchen, as the result of shrewd observation, 
and these are passed to and fro among men, who 
follow their suggestions without thinking of their 
origin. The remembrance of these and other 
things might well beget a sort of contempt for, 
and a predominance over, the weakness of the very 
beings for whom the philosopher of the kitchen is 
wont to minister. He ends by looking down upon 
his race from an exalted height, like Diocletian 
among his cabbages. It is this contemplation, 
undoubtedly, which inspires the Engadiners to 
gaze far beyond the incessant tumult of a large 



64 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 

city with, its insatiate call for roast and boiled, 
for ragouts and entremets, to that tranquil re- 
treat, where the days follow each other like a row 
of empty pews and the most startling events are 
sunrise and sunset. The chain grows only the 
stronger with its length, and draws them with 
ever-increasing tenacity towards that haven, stern 
though lovely, where the calm peace of the pres- 
ent shall drown the noisy clatter of the past and 
even gild their declining years with a sedate gay- 
ety. It has been long asserted that " the devil 
sends cooks," but any one that had noticed the 
dignity and self -retention of this class in Pontre- 
sina, would be slow to admit the truth of this be- 
quest of the wisdom and wit of ages. He would 
be far more willing to attribute its origin to the 
diseased brain of some spiteful and remorseless 
dyspeptic, whom a long career of indigestion had 
made cynical and abusive. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE SCHLUCHT PHOMENADE. — THE LINK^A. 

At some distance from the Hotel Saraz in Pon- 
tresina, a road slopes abruptly to a rude arch span- 
ning a chasm. Veering to the right a few hundred 
feet farther on, it pursues its way towards the 
mountains, between craggy steeps bristling with 
evergreens. Thus for several leagues, ascending 
and descending by turns, but ever achieving a 
higher level, it finally dwindles into turfy ruts. 
These are soon swallowed up by a long mound of 
gravel, profusely illustrated with stones on one side 
and a towering rampart of ice on the other. The 
ice is the flank of the Roseg ^ Glacier, the mound 
is its moraine, and the stones are bowlders, large 
and small, the cast-off debris of the Alps. All 
these are ten miles or so from the village, though 
the transparent medium through which they are 
viewed gives the white and lustrous masses of the 
glacier but half that offing. The road is ill-made 
and quite rough. Being designed mostly for the 
use of pleasure parties, the commune could not af- 
ford to spend much for its improvement. Never- 

1 This word is pronounced RosedJ and is derived from two 
Celtic words meaning ^' mountain-brook." 



56 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



theless, a small annual sum has kept it in decent 
order, and it is much better at this day than for- 
merly. Once a scanty and dubious footway, it has 
gradually attained to the dignity of wheels, though 
even now it is in a transitory state, and vehicles 
can hardly pass each other without danger of col- 
lision. Thus to timid riders the trip is spiced 
with possible peril, and those of the nervous sex 
who manage to slip by unscathed make the most 
thereof as a luckj^ escape, a little adventure, or 
other pleasing excitement. To those, on the con- 
trary, who are not obliged to depend on wheels, 
nothing can be more enjoyable than this excursion, 
and nowhere are tourists of the peripatetic school 
more likely to appreciate their blessings. 

Just beyond the arch above mentioned a path 
diverges to the left and enters a wood. It was 
planned and laid out by the authorities, with con- 
siderable forethought and public spirit, solely for 
the enjoyment of their summer guests. This was 
the more to their credit, since the villagers them- 
selves have no fancy for exercise and never resort 
to it, feeling only pity, to tell the truth, for those 
who are fain to seek their health by dawdling 
about the country, when they might be so much 
happier at home. Well supplied with seats over- 
looking a lovely and varied landscape ; meander- 
ing among the trees, with open meadows and 
sunny glades at intervals, enlivened by abundant 
flowers and falling waters ; partly bordering on 
a deep ravine, through which a brawling stream 



THE SCHLUCHT PROMEyADE, 



57 



makes its tumultuous progress toward the Inn, it 
is one of the greatest charms of Pontresina, and 
is none the less valued from its vicinity to the ho- 
tels. That naught in the power of man might be 
wanting to its attractions, it was provided with a 
name. High on the trunk of a scraggy larch the 
curious visitor detects a sign in metaphysical Ger- 
man text, gold letters on a black ground. Stand- 
ing on tiptoe and skillfully adjusting his glasses, or 
his retina, as the case may be, he reads, Schlucht 
Promenade" (Gorge Walk). 

So much is obvious, even to a casual observer, 
while many would be quick to notice, and the dull- 
est scholar would hardly need to learn, the widely 
different nationality of these two words. The 
veteran traveler, however, with whom a tiny spark 
may often serve to set fire to a copious train of re- 
flection, at the sight of these hereditary foes thus 
hanging in palpable contrast, — 

Two furious cats suspended by the tail, 
And swinging cheek by jowl i 

is led to divers inquiries. 

Whence this incongruous union, suggestive only 
of mutual reproaches, eternal bickerings, plum- 
baginous and naufrageous epithets, broken crock- 
ery, charges of cold feet and a final appeal to the 
courts ? 

Was it from simple inadvertence, from hyper- 
fastidious refinement of style ? or from the artful 
tact of the commune, anxious to conciliate all and 
to give offense to none, especially in the present 

3* 

I 



58 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



relations of great empires, and with Bismarckian 
subtlety in prospect ? Whatever may have been 
the reason, one cannot avoid observing that the 
words were admirably chosen as types of their re- 
spective tongues. As to the smoothly-flowing ele- 
gance of the French — '-^Vargento de' Franceschi''^ 
— it is so clear that he who runs may read, while 
none could fail to recognize its yoke - fellow ; a 
despotic vowel gorged with superfluous and unnec- 
essary consonants, to which it had in all probabil- 
ity no original right, and which it knows not how 
to employ to advantage, like a rapacious spider 
centring a web thickly hung with the bodies of 
the victims whose life-blood he has sucked. A 
moment's thought, and we perceive the perfect 
keeping of the whole. As we pursue our smoothly 
winding promenade, we soon appreciate the apt 
significance of the name. Leaning over the par- 
apet of the bridge, we comprehend why schlucht 
signifies a gorge ; a dark and gloomy rift, barren 
and forbidding, where a torrent, hoarsely growling 
with guttural cries for vengeance, plunges over a 
rocky bed, leaving havoc and desolation behind it. 
Never did sound and sense more fully agree. 

Wandering from the stream, we penetrate the 
deeper recesses of the wood. Soon on our right 
appear huge heaps of stone, thrown down in wild 
confusion from the heights above, sole testimony 
of the defeat, perchance, of baffled Titans who, 
fiercely struggling, sought to force an entrance 
through the very walls of heaven. Here and 



THE SCHLUCHT PROMENADE. 



59 



there through dim vistas among the trees, or won 
by the perspective of roughly scored ravines with 
solemn evergreens predominating from every ledge 
where they can maintain a foothold, the vision 
takes in vast precipices, or ranges over high past- 
ures strewn here and there with stones, to decliv- 
ities of frozen snow, while beyond rise tapering 
peaks of ice sharply cut against the limpid blue. 
Here are silence and solitude not unattended with 
awe, for there is a silence which is as the voice of 
God. But in this spot, as in myriad others, nat- 
ure has done her best to heal the wounds of time 
and to hide the scars of conflict with an ample and 
perpetual drapery. Everywhere amid this wild 
and heaped desolation, working with tranquil faith 
and a courage that knows no obstacle, she has 
caused herbage, flowers and a plenteous verdure 
to spring up. These enliven the sombre recesses 
and sterile ruin around with a life and light of 
their own. Over and among them bend blooming 
shrubs, while above mount the pines and larches 
in picturesque groups or serried ranks, climbing 
shelf after shelf, and crag after crag, till only a 
few scanty groups are left alone to defy the storm 
and to shake the snow from their sturdy stateli- 
ness. 

In every direction the earth is carpeted with 
blossoms, and glows like a constellation. The 
anemone and the forget-me-not, the harebell and 
the cyclamen ; the soldanella, the ranunculus and 
violets, white, purple and yellow, all are there, but 



60 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



chief among them, with a winning grace belong- 
ing to none else, is the delicate Linn^a, which 
here finds a congenial home, and adorns it with 
the serenity of its own peculiar radiance. An 
evergreen itself, the daughter of the North, ^ the 
child of cold and dimness, sole offspring of a sin- 
gle genus, in this land of vivid brightness shrink- 
ing from the day, it fitly consorts with those trees 
of unfading foliage, and under their shade it mostly 
seeks its rejoicing abode and works out its peace- 
ful mission of good will to all. Modestly creep- 
ing and with shy affection interlacing its slender 
rootlets and trailing stems ; ever advancing with 
a certain maidenly though confident assurance of 
merit, in which is no offense ; with meek reliance 
it proffers its twin bells, which tremulously swing 
responsive to the feeblest movement. In default 
of music, they scatter on the air a faint aroma, 
most grateful and quick with life, beguiling the 
soul like a duet of sweet accord, which gradually 
subdues all dissonance to itself. From a presence 
so seductive, " stealing and giving odor," might 
well come a gentle and evanescent harmony, quiv- 
ering on the inner sense, like rose leaves on still 
waters, whose dying fall only intimates those un- 
dulations which the grosser vision fails to see. 

So fragile is this tender existence, that there is 
not a zephyr whose breath does not agitate it with 

1 In his Flora Lapponica, Linnaeus states that he saw in Lap- 
land stems of this plant eighteen feet in length, which is much 
greater than they ever attain elsewhere, and this would seem to 
prove that country to be its favorite habitat. 



THE LINN ^ A. 



61 



nervous apprehension. The butterfly is loath to 
impose the dainty touch of her slender feet, and 
even the inexorable and all-plundering bee, here 
pitying and unwilling to destroy, leaves its stores 
of nectar unrifled, and gladly spares the frailty of 
its beauty. Thus it happens that the Linnsea 
clings with a fervid instinct born of fear to every- 
thing that may afford it protection. Provident 
for the future, it binds closely its tendrils, and 
shields them with its leaves, and takes firm hold 
of the soil with its numberless fibres. Claiming 
every shelter with a trust that will not be rejected, 
it gathers at the base of spreading trees, covering 
their roots, as if in gratitude, with its shining and 
imperishable greenness, cool and refreshing in sum- 
mer, and warm in winter, like Ruth, lying at their 
feet until the morning and finding favor in their 
sight. Nor does the Linngea reject even such se- 
curity as it may obtain from the chill patronage 
of the haughty bowlder, though aware that the on- 
ward march of that eternal wanderer may one day 
crush it without remorse. Here, also, in grate- 
ful recognition, the Linnsea nestles lovingly in its 
shadow, clinging around and embracing its massive 
grandeur with soft arms and many a caress, bath- 
ing it with perfume, and ever and anon casting up 
little waves of fragrance from many censers, trem- 
bling the while at its own audacity, bending its 
head with diffidence, or cowering in dread before 
the bitter wind and drenching rain with out- 
stretched arms of suppliant entreaty. And thus 



62 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



in all humility, " proposing to itself no future ex- 
altation, but only a sweet continuance," it pursues 
its fruitful way. 

In presence of this lovely symbol of ever-bright, 
though unassuming grace, one lends a willing ear 
to the poet's utterance, that the stars tell all their 
secrets to the flowers, and gladly regards this 
double star of earth as the chosen friend of the 
glittering hosts above, and the fit recipient of those 

keenest sensibilities," with which old philosophy 
endowed them in their "living and bright man- 
sions," whence blessed spirits beheld all things in 
nature and in the divine ideas.^ With these the 
Linnsea might well hold commune high and bear 
fresh witness to the truth subtly revealed for our 
learning in the verses, 

" There not a flower of spring 
That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied 
By issue and symbol, by significance 
And correspondence, to that spirit-world 
Outside the limits of our space and time, 
Whereunto we are bound.'' 

The origin of the name of the Linnaea is so 
generally known, that it is almost superfluous to 
recall it. Before the time of Linnaeus it was called 
Campanula serpyllifolia,^ but he detected the in- 

1 By some such stellar sympathy as this, one is tempted to ex- 
plain the richer fragrance with which the Linnsea loads the hours 
of star-lit nights and which is far more perceptible than during 
the day. 

2 This was much longer than the title it now bears, and it was 
a handsome tribute to the great naturalist, that the botanists of 



THE LINNJEA. 



63 



accuracy of this classification and made clear cer- 
tain generic peculiarities which distinguished it 
from any other, and in fact showed it to be a 
genus in itself. To this he asserted his claim by 
giving it his own name, or by causing it to be 
given by his friend Gronovius. It was in one re- 
spect unfortunate that he chose to perpetuate his 
fame through a plant so widely spread and so 
much admired, as it has served to keep before the 
world that excessive vanity which was the weak 
point in his character, and which otherwise might 
have passed into oblivion. In this quality he sur- 
passed all other men that have ever lived. Those 
familiar with the life and works of Chateaubriand, 
or those of Lamartine, may imagine that they 
have some idea of self-conceit, but theirs was a 
mere bubble compared with the huge balloon of 
Linnseus, which sought to scale the skies and domi- 
nate the whole universe. K'aturalists have most- 
ly been content to leave their reputations to the 
justice of posterity, or of the age in which they 
lived, without self-assertion, but Linngeus greedily 
clutched at renown without waiting to be helped, 
and he is the sole instance of any botanist, or 
other scientific man, bestowing his own name on 
any created thing. His egregious conceit was 
never for a moment in abeyance, but extorted 
incessant and unstinted adulation. Great as is 
the glory undoubtedly due him, it has never 

his day sacrificed in his honor without a murmur no less than five 
consonants, three yowels and the same number of whole syllables. 



64 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



equaled the claims which he exacted during his 
life. All his geese were swans, and, like his own 
Linnaea, he never bore anj^thing but twins. The 
motto which he selected for his coat of arms — 
with his favorite flower for a crest — " Famam 
extendere factis^''^ was the real mirror of his soul, 
and he wrote it in all the memorial books pre- 
sented by his continental friends. 

The diary of Linnaeus is most unique and in- 
structive. It was continued till a few years before 
his death, and was written, partly by his own 
hand, partly from his dictation, with the intention 
of submitting it to the French Academy for print- 
ing in their transactions. For pure egotism, it 
certainly was never matched. Narrating his tri- 
umphs in Csesarean style, he writes, He was 
styled by all botanists Princeps Botanicorumy 

No person has ever proved himself a greater 
botanist or zoologist." 

" No person was ever more conversant with, or 
made more discoveries in, natural history." 

No person has ever become so celebrated all 
over the world." 

The climax is reached when we read : — 
He was in the highest degree averse to auy- 
thing that bore the appearance of pride." 

This catalogue of his own merits runs on for a 
score of pages. Like his own Lapland Linn^a, 
with its shoots eighteen feet long and still grow- 
ing, his vanity never knew where to stop. 

In his Critiea Botanica, the illustrious Swede 



TEE LINNjEA. 



65 



states that the Linnasa was named by Gronovius 
from its resemblance to him, being depressed, 
humble, neglected, flowering in a short time." 
This fanciful mixture of pride and mock humility 
was certainly artful and ingenious, but one cannot 
help seeing through the veil, and inferring that 
Linnaeus appropriated it to himself because it was 
the only representative of a whole genus, which is 
not true of any other known plant, and thus no 
one would ever be likely to share the honor it 
conferred. As to any particular love for the blos- 
soms of the Linnaea, there seems to be no evi- 
dence thereof, for Linnaeus had nothing poetical or 
sentimental in his nature, and nowhere in his writ- 
ings does one meet with any expression of admira- 
tion for flowers, apart from their scientific interest, 
nor do any of his biographers ever attribute to him 
such a taste. 

While on this subject, I take occasion to say a 
word in regard to the proper mode of spelling the 
name of Linnaeus. This has been the source of 
much debate ; the more so, that, even among his 
own kindred, it was quite indefinite. His ances- 
tors, being peasants, followed a custom peculiar to 
their country, and took their designation from a 
tall linden tree, growing near their farm. Some 
of them were called Lindelius, others Tiliander, 
as they preferred a Latin, or Swedish, origin. 
The father wrote Linn^us, adding a Latin ter- 
mination to a Swedish word. This form his son 
himself employed in his correspondence, and when- 



66 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



ever else he had occasion to use his autograph, till 
he was ennobled, and by this he was invariably- 
addressed and mentioned by his friends, Haller, 
Boerhaave, and others, in their letters to him. 
The same always occurs in his diary, before he 
received a title, after which he made use of Lin- 
naeus and Von Linne indifferently. As he was 
not ennobled, until he was over sixty years of age 
and had convinced the world of his genius, it 
would seem more natural and more fitting to re- 
tain the name with which he was so long identi- 
fied, and by which he endeared himself to the re- 
spect and esteem of every lover of nature. One 
can at his option avail himself of Linnaeus, or Lin- 
neus, and that correctly, according as he prefers to 
trace the derivation from the family or from the 
title of the great botanist, though the latter would 
strike most people as hardly appropriate, should 
the thought occur to them, that it was never used 
on a single occasion by him upon whom they be- 
stow it. To this it may also be added, that Lin- 
naeus himself can be reasonably supposed to have 
displayed his preference in the matter by the ap- 
pellation he chose for his own plant. A case some- 
what similar may be familiar to my readers. . I 
mean that of Count Rumford, to whom, in ex- 
change for his family name of Benjamin Thomp- 
son, a title was granted, as an acknowledgment 
of his talents and abilities. Under this only did 
he become famous, and by this only is he now 
known ; but it is easy to account for the fact, 



THE LINNJEA, 



67 



when we reflect that he became Count Rumford 
as a comparatively young man and in a foreign 
country, and that his chief claims to esteem were 
really acquired after his promotion. The prin- 
cipal botanical body in England was incorporated 
as The Linnean Society^ the founders choosing 
this designation with a natural deference to a 
title, while its seal represents the sun worship- 
ping the Linnsea borealis. In its " Transactions " 
the spelling always eraploj^ed is Linnaeus, and 
even at its inauguration the first president. Dr. 
James Edward Smith — the eminent botanist and 
purchaser of the herbarium of Linnaeus — in his 
"Introductory Discourse" made use of the same, 
as he does elsewhere in his writings. This is some- 
what as if the president of a Rumford Society 
should eulogize " the immortal Thompson, to 
whom we are indebted for the name and style 
under which we have this day for the first time 
assembled." 



CHAPTER V. 



THE EOSEG GLACIEB EX YOITUEE. — THE KOSEG 
GLACIER A PIED. — ''THE ABCH-CHEmC SUN." 
— THE ''HERMIT OF THE DALE." 

PoNTRESiNA is for pedestrians a more tempt- 
ing resort than any other in Switzerland, and the 
profit and enjoyment, the novel impressions and 
varied information afforded by a long walk are 
most remarkable, especially if one be alone and 
free from the interruption of a chattering compan- 
ion. On the contrary, to those who have not the 
unlimited use of their feet it naturally follows, that 
there are sundry drawbacks from a full apprecia- 
tion. The truth of these remarks is well illus- 
trated by the experience of travelers to the Roseg 
Glacier. To him who confides wholly in his own 
limbs, every step of the way is enticing, and the 
trip seems only too short ; but others are often 
constrained to take a different view. The road 
being very rough — extremely so after heavy rains 
— the prudent natives are loath to risk their few 
good vehicles upon it, and so have designed a more 
solid kind of conveyance, to which the less active 
of their visitors are obliged to intrust their " vile " 
bodies. This is a species of rude cart, like the 



THE ROSEG GLACIER EN VOITURE. 69 



Linnasa, the only existing species yet known. It 
is drawn by one horse, and made for the express 
purpose of contending with the inequalities of the 
route. It is everything that is awkward and in- 
convenient. There are neither springs nor cush- 
ions. The wheels are small, and the body long 
and narrow. It requires nearly an acre of level 
ground in which to turn. The sides of broad slats 
stand out obliquely, like a tipsy fence. It seems 
to be composed of negatives, and, as with a snow- 
plow, one instantly conjectures its use. Too nar- 
row for a hay-cart, too long for a tip-cart, too low 
for wood, too open for potatoes, it is every way 
too weak for any place except that for which it 
was obviously designed. For this it is admirably 
adapted, and one can easily imagine it to have ac- 
quired in the lapse of ages a sort of instinctive 
idea of the object of its creation, which is to make 
its way in the world by colliding with everything 
and everybody that comes near it. Its sole mis- 
sion in life appears to be friction. So far as this 
is concerned, long experience has taught it pretty 
much all that is to be learned, and what it has not 
learned is not worth knowing. Its entire way to 
the glacier is made up of antagonisms, and there 
is no rock, however large and rough, no stone, 
however small and slippery, which it fails to hit, 
and that with a will ; no hole, however muddy, 
no rut, however deep, of which it does not sound 
the very bottom with a personal and obstinate ani- 
mosity. 



70 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



When out for a walk to the head of the Roseg 
Valley, I saw one of these wagons approaching. 
As it drew nearer I recognized two guests from 
our hotel, evidently daring the perils of the excur- 
sion for the first time. They were elderly maiden 
ladies, whose playful little minauderies and piqu- 
ant remarks, added to their picturesque garb and 
manners, had often excited the observation of the 
curious and bewitched us all of an evening. Of 
this class there were many at Pontresina, and in 
fact they are everywhere numerous on the Conti- 
nent among the English — persons in all respects 
estimable, generally favored with some specialty — 
drawing, painting, botanizing, or what not — which 
serves to pass the time and give a tone to their ex- 
istence. They mostly have sufficient means to pro- 
vide the comforts of life, but not enough to stimu- 
late the interested devotion of marauders from the 
other sex. Being old frequenters of Pontresina, 
these two had arrived early and chosen snug quar- 
ters for themselves in a sunny corner. From tha 
spot where I stood I could distinguish the very 
windows where their sponges hung out like wasps' 
nests, and their towels swayed to and fro, the sport 
of any wandering and unscrupulous breeze that 
offered them a momentary attention. They had 
long been planning to visit the glacier, and had 
dropped many an anchor to windward with that 
object; but beaux were scarce, self-denying ones 
still more so, ne'er beheld but wondered at," and 
these dames found no soft adorings at their dis- 



THE ROSEG GLACIER EN VOITURE. 



n 



posal ; hence they had finally been driven to tempt 
their fate alone. 

As they moved towards me down the lengthy 
slope, not so steep as it was rough, they presented 
a most vivid tableau, though for devotees of hap- 
piness they were evidently laboring under many 
disabilities. Whirled uneasily on in their direful 
car, with dislocation impending, their anti-glacial 
blue glasses — their only protectors — dangling all 
abroad ; their cheeks as red as a maple leaf in Oc- 
tober ; with veils and ribbons, with muffs and 
cuffs and fardingales and things," awry and flut- 
tering in the air, they still strove to distribute 
their corporal woes over as wide a space as possi- 
ble. Holding fast with one hand, and finding mul- 
titudinous uses for the other, nimbly clutching here 
and there, at intervals they steadied themselves 
by tenaciously grasping the back or side of the 
seat. Now bracing themselves preternaturally up- 
right, their lips graphic with firm resolution, and 
the resolve to conquer or die ; now leaning dis- 
tractedly forward, ''on pleasure bent," they went 
through every phase of that sudden adaptation 
which happy instinct, or, perchance, inspiration, 
so quickly teaches the human frame. The morn- 
ing was tranquil, but as they shot past me they 
seemed in a gale. I wished them good day and 
bon voyage (this with a shade of malice) ; but 
their replies, if any, were inaudible. So com- 
plete was their abstraction, and so vehement their 
motion, that even a chignon had sprung from its 



72 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 

moorings and floundered tumultuously, like a dy- 
ing turtle, without exciting the smallest notice. 
Poor victims ! " Did Heaven look on and would 
not take their part?" 

It is in a crisis like this that the female person 
abruptly discerns the uncertain nature of its com- 
position and the precarious tenure by which it 
secures even a momentary bliss. It is then that 
many things, heretofore skillfully kept in abey- 
ance, though ever lying in ambush, make their 
way peremptorily to the light, and the sex quickly 
sees itself a prey to a pregnant sense of buckles 
and straps, hoops and whalebone, pins and combs, 
which it would die rather than reveal to the world. 
Yet who shall portray the more than Spartan en- 
durance with which these heroines sought to hide 
the agony that was preying on their vitals? What 
an expression of intense enjoyment did they as- 
sume ! With what pardonable artifice did they 
blandly smile ; a smile like that of St. Agnes at 
the stake, or like the sunshine on an overflow- 
ing volcano ! And how they talked, maugre 
every discrepancy ! The stream of speech, the 
inborn eloquence of woman." still gurgled on mel- 
lifluous. The tongue, that unruly member which 

can no man tame," still held its own. As they 
bounced impetuously on, came shattered ejacula- 
tions of delight at the scenery, with occasional 
spasmodic cries of discomfort, which appeared to 
burst out of them unwittingly like the fragments 
of an exploded shell, while a cascade of incoherent 



THE ROSEG GLACIER EN VOITURE, 73 



small talk in a minor key flowed forth, as "the 
water comes down at Lodore," both talking at 
once, never ending, still beginning," with such 
nervous gesticulation as they were spry enough 
to snatch under the circumstances — a genuine 
chute de mots." Away rolled the Linn^a with 
its twin belles, in a shower of dust, sparks and 
rattling pebbles, and a rapid torrent of varied 
nothings — two Guinea hens in a squall, scudding 
before the wind, with ruffled plumage and empty 
clatter.^ 

As the party vanished, I smiled grimly to ob- 
serve that the driver was evidently master of the 
situation. He was decidedly a cold-blooded ani- 
mal with no more nerves than a turnip, and this 
was fortunate, as on such an occasion they would 
have been worse than useless. Well aware that 
he could not come to pieces, he was serenely confi- 
dent. Midway pendent on a little perch in front, 
close to the horse's tail, he maintained himself in 
equilihrio with a quiet dexterity wonderful to be- 
hold. Probably, from long practice he had be- 
come as oblivious as a cherub of any seat what- 
ever. He guided his steed, and said nothing in 
spite of the fire in the rear. He was a family 
man and used to it; a philosopher perforce. Once 
he gave a capacious yawn, displaying a most rav- 

^ " Femme ; article ridicule, qui peut devenir instructif et pi- 
quant/' (Voltaire.) 

" Ceux qui n'ont vu que la misere des hommes n^ont rien vu ; il 
faut voir la misere des femmes/' (Victor Hugo.) 
4 



74 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



enous set of teeth, as lie did so, and a maxillary 
deyelopment equal to any amount of execution, 
and that with a nonchalance which spoke volumes ; 
but he was too wise to utter a word. 

The gods approve 
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul." 

It was one of those fair days of universal peace, 
a " truce of God," when Nature, shining like a 
newly-risen star, rejoices in her own well-doing 
and everywhere dispenses a softly-flowing bounty, 
free from all trace of human passion or worldly 
discord ; when the wine of life thrills full and free, 
and one needs no other society than the nervous 
rapture of his own quick-glancing thoughts. There 
was a murmur in the fragrant atmosphere, a sym- 
phony of delight, the harmony of a thousand low 
and almost imperceptible utterances, when sense 
responded to sense " with interchange of gift," to 
the intent ear unfolding marvels. The rustle of 
the brook was loudest in that gentle diapason of 
the faintly- creeping roots, the opening flowers, 
timidly exposing their charms to the day, the 
clasping tendrils, the softly-swaying leaves, and 
all that melodious homage of the secret soul which 
needs no swelling paeans for the expression of its 
worship. 

Far in the distance the glacier lay outspread, a 
white hand extended from the clouds, as if in 
blessing. The exhilarating air throbbed and spar- 
kled in the veins, giving fresh impulse to the rosy 
blood, as when one discovers hidden gold. The 



THE ARCH-CHEMIC SUN. 



75 



elastic earth rolled swiftly away from the gayly- 
springing feet. From the grandeur of his state 
the sun, " Lo ministro maggior della natura," 
looked down in radiant effulgence. Life seemed 
boundless and untainted. The sward on either 
hand was starred with flowers, and shone like the 
broad page of an illuminated missal. The brook 
pursued its varied course with many a choral in- 
terlude and sweet, expressive whispering; now 
with bland solicitation fondling those rejoicing 
shores which, alas ! it would one day insidiously 
destroy ; now, with a winsome pleading, seeming 
to ask permission to pass through that enchanted 
vale ; toying with the trees that hung amorously 
over it with mild passion, smitten by their own re- 
flected beauty ; soothing the pebbles in its depths ; 
imparting a tale of love to the blossoms on its 
banks, or responding to the bees as they chanted 
their litany of industry. 

On each side slopes, broad and verdurous, sud- 
denly gave way to the vaulting ambition of cliffs 
and precipices, bearing here and there a scanty 
shrub, or an air-fed, lonely tree that " clasped the 
crag with hooked hands." At their bases lay the 
shattered ruins of the past. Scarred with bat- 
tle, they stood apart defiantly, valor still seething 
in their breasts and brows yet frowning ; giants 
petrified in the heat of the conflict ; their armor 
dinted, crests disheveled, weapons broken, stiff- 
ened havoc strewn around them ; warring cham- 
pions whose deeds of high emprise had once con- 



76 



GLEAXIXGS FROM PONTEESINA. 



densed an epic into an hour, but who now, under 
a charm, are yet to feel the flickering embers of 
impotent rage in their souls, till such times as 
the spell shall be dissolved in the final Armaged- 
don of the world, " the battle of that great day of 
God Almighty/' 

Across the yalley sailed a few fitful clouds, 
placidly shadowing the blue profound beyond, 
transient offspring of the dew, vaguely defined ; 
indistinctly real, like dreams when one awakes ; 
with ever imperceptibly-changing outlines, like 
our own destinies, which make us the victims of 
an unknown future : languid, irresolute, void of im- 
l^ulse, they inertly drifted, yet still the subjects 
of omnipotent law, nor less tributary than the hel- 
meted peaks that towered above them. On eva- 
nescent wings they floated tranquilly, and from 
their depths one seemed to hear faint, distant 
melodies, as of a summer night, stealing forth 
from heavenly abodes, hymning immortal bliss ; 
or pensive strains, perchance, sad with shadowy 
memories of illusions forever past. Bathed in the 
glowing ether, like translated souls, blessed spirits 
surveying the grossness of earth from the serenity 
of their exceeding peace, in their mien beamed 
gracious purity and calmness, mingled with undy- 
iug love and pity for the lost. 

Gradually the day blossomed into the full ex- 
pansion of its glory, and the sun poured forth a 
rich luxuriance of light, impregnated with mighty 
virtue, into every dim recess, chasing the darkness, 



THE ARCH-CHEMIC SUN. 



77 



dispelling the damp and mist, revealing to earth 
the brightness out of Paradise. It tempered the 
harshness of the crags, infused a warm blood into 
the coldness of the rocks, and won responsive glad- 
ness even from the sullen and soulless lichens. 
Far and wide the landscape glowed at the copious 
largesse, and abounding gratitude welled up from 
its silent, though thankful joy. The great, glori- 
ous glacier itself sparkled and was glad with one 
broad, ample, overflowing smile, and poured forth 
its very soul, that the brook might bear the ta.le of 
the sun's well-doing to the river, and the river im- 
part it to the ocean, and the ocean, with many a 
soft embrace, confide it to the verdant isles. 

" To solemnize this day the glorious sun 
Stays in his course and plays the alchemist, 
Turning with splendor of his precious eye 
The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold/' 

Thus to our lightly-clad intelligence do light and 
warmth quicken into audible harmony and signifi- 
cance the very silence that broods over the face of 
Nature. If we are indeed children of "the arch- 
chemic sun," as Milton terms the great Zeus of 
Nature, it is on such a day as this that our origin 
is fully proved. No son of Adam would deny it. 
We feel it in our heart of hearts, and this tie binds 
us to all created things. Light is the life-blood 
of nature, and we do well to absorb its subtly- 
strengthening influences where their purest essence 
mingles with the emanations of forests and mead- 
ows, shrubs and flowers. Most wisely wrote Vol- 



78 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



taire, " Si les hommes etaient sages ils se met- 
traient toujours au soleil." 

And yet, sad to say, even a scene so fair as this 
had its nugget of misery, even a page so white had 
its blot. In a small stone cabin near the end of 
my route I found a solitary man, a cross-grained 
hermit, moody and despairing, like one who had 
lost everything, even his way to the tomb. He 
was the centre of a select family of a dog, a pet 
marmot and two pigs. Driven from his own kind 
by a sense of wrong, in the society of these he had 
taken refuge and with them fled to the wilderness. 
He appeared to be deriving a scanty and uncertain 
support from the few tourists who might pass by 
his hut on their route to the glacier. As I was rest- 
ing and drinking a glass of milk, I gradually drew 
forth his pitiful story. He had once been a happy 
peasant on a few acres of land, but had been purged, 
though hardly purified, by affliction, which had 
been sudden and rough. He had been drawn for 
military service by a paternal, though inconsid- 
erate, government, and in a few hours had been 
transformed from a valuable farmer into a worth- 
less soldier. A third-class carriage, void of cush- 
ions, paint or glass, had taken him and many others 
more than a hundred miles to a huge barrack. He 
had been put into an ugly and comfortless uniform, 
three sizes too small for him. He had been obliged 
to sleep in a room with scores of similar patriots, 
on a bed like a tiled roof. Their food was of the 
coarsest, and not very plentiful at that. His beer 



THE HERMIT OF THE DALE. 79 

had been sour. As a reward for all these suffer- 
ings, he had received only one sou per day, though, 
to make the remuneration seem larger, it had been 
termed five centimes. But, oh the drill I That 
had harrowed up his very soul. Plainly he had 
been very obstinate or very stupid, for he had been 
treated to much curt and peremptory justice, many 
abusive epithets, and cuffs and slaps not a few. 
Worst of all, he had been rudely interrupted when 
about to offer an admirable explanation, and had 
been denied the privilege of saying a single word 
in his own defense. I inferred that his sergeant 
was a man of active temperament, and not dis- 
posed to listen to long-winded excuses. The lan- 
guage of this sub-ofl&cer appeared to have been 
more laconic than polite, and from long experience 
with new recruits he had discovered where to hit 
them on the raw." Lout, oaf, lubber, hete^ nigaud^ 
dummer karl^ and even coarser and more expressive 
taunts, had been hurled at him without stint. Thus 
his honor and self-esteem had been sorely hurt, nor 
had he ever been favored with any balm in the 
shape of sympathy ; for his companions had taken 
part with the oppressor and added their jeers to 
his. And so it had gone on through his whole 
term, from bad to worse, till he had returned to 
Pontresina, at the end of his campaign, homesick, 
heartsick and wretched. Far better had he met 
the enemy on the field and left one of his limbs 
there. There had been wounds, to be sure, and 
those most aggravating, but of such a nature, that 



80 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



few governments would have thouglit liim entitled 
to any honorarium — least of all bis own, which 
is obliged to be economical, even to its heroes. 

He glowed, as he spoke, with a sense of his 
wrongs. He hated the paternal government ; he 
hated his race ; he hated the world ; he would be- 
come a radical. ''If I only had that sergeant 
here, would n't I lead him a dance ! " And he 
glared with a certain ferocity, and clenched his 
hands in a way which would have made " that 
sergeant " tremble. Here was a tale to move the 
stoutest heart. The speaker saw no beauty in the 
scene around him. To him it rained ink, and in 
his veins ran vinegar and wormwood. Appar- 
ently it was a long time since he had met with any 
one interested in his sorrows, or who cared to afford 
him an opportunity of relieving his feelings. These 
all rushed forth with the fury of pent-up waters. 
At times, even, scalding tears dropped on his 
voluminous trousers. There was no round-about 
discursiveness, or rhetorical amplij&cation. His 
sentences were short and to the point. His woes 
were too acute to be smothered in whipped cream. 
The great emotions are alway laconic in their ex- 
pression. When one is on the rack, he does not 
speak '' Johnsonese," but is sparing of his conso- 
nants. The words flashed from him vivid as " the 
swift lightning's momentary noon." The fervid 
sparks flew fiercely from the hammer of his wrath. 
For the moment he was like a bowlder struck by 
a thunderbolt, and the red-hot fragments hissed 



THE HERMIT OF THE DALE. 81 

through the air. But even these did not suffice to 
show the full force of his anger. His whole as- 
pect changed and he glowed like a flaming image. 
His face expressed a keen scorn. A feverish light 
seemed to flicker even in his dull eyes. His whole 
body heaved with internal throes, like the throbs 
of a geyser contending with mysterious fires. The 
vehemence of his appeal was scorching. Clearly 
" that sergeant " was better where he was than 
here ; there is a certain annihilation in words, and 
there are times when indignation blights, like fire 
from heaven. 

I was overcome with astonishment at this sud- 
den outbreak, and found myself unable to say a 
word. Who could have anticipated such a tor- 
nado of passion from a mere lump of flesh, a creat- 
ure formed only for locomotion, vegetation and 
the absorption of black bread and goat's milk? 
Ordinarily he had parboiled eyes and a vacant 
stare. Brains there were none, only a protoplasm 
undeveloped and so carefully concealed as to be 
useless. Of such a being, the life is ordinarily a 
routine of monotonous repetition. The days pull 
each other along like the links of a rusty chain. 
On the chief of the seven he falls asleep over the 
first chapter of Matthew, which he finds as good 
an opiate as another. The rest he devotes, per- 
chance, to spelling out laboriously the contents of 
an almanac five years old. Often he snores by the 
fire, obliviously responsive to one of his own pigs, 

which looks in over the threshold with the meek en- 
4* 



82 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



treaty of a poor relation, and seems to say, " I hail 
thee, brother," hanging the while his lop-pointed 
ears with an air of pensive expectation, wriggling 
his tail inquisitively like an interrogation point, 
and plaintively urging his claim for possible scanty 
remnants of the supper. The resemblance be- 
tween these two is certainly more obvious than 
the difference. One goes on all fours, bristly au 
naturel. The other walks erect, with a covering 
neatly forked provided by the village tailor, which 
gives him a finish that nature, at least, thought 
superfluous. Each for the most part grovels at 
the roots of things, and neither has much voice, 
except when his heartstrings are cracking. And 
yet this inert mass of matter, this clod, on this oc- 
casion unveiled his superiority and flashed forth 
the vital spark that lay torpid within him, proving 
that he was no porker after all. It was the one 
touch of nature which " makes the whole world 
kin." 

Thus great orators, mounting to the height, 
smite the dull rock of dormant feeling and draw 
forth rich floods of passion, quivering with the fine 
frenzy of their own sorrows, or the grand contagion 
of a nation's wrongs. 

Sunt lacrimse rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt/' 

I remained only a short space in the cabin, but 
before I left it the whirlwind of excitement had 
passed and my host had resumed the dull vacuity 
of his daily life, though from time to time a sigh 



THE HERMIT OF THE DALE, 



83 



or hardly audible muttering gave evidence that 
the storm was only " moaning and calling out of 
other lands," and might swiftly return. As I con- 
tinued my walk I reflected, and the more I re- 
flected the more I pitied. There was much call 
for pity. A man with a grievance is a most inter- 
esting study in human nature. Next to owning a 
grievance one's self, there is nothing like interview- 
ing one thus wofully endowed. There is an intense 
side to his character which is peculiarly impress- 
ive, the more so that it is developed by long and 
lonely meditation. He is not likely to be troubled 
with much society. His ideas are contracted by 
incessantly running in one groove. He resembles 
a barrel with one small hole through which every- 
thing must go either in or out. He talks to him- 
self about his troubles all day and dreams about 
them all night. When he wakes he has already 
been carrying on an indignant monologue for an 
hour. Thus internal friction wears away the soul 
and he ends by eating out his own heart. Surely 
he deserves the sympathy of the world. 



CHAPTER VL 



ALPINE FLO WEES. — THE CEMBEA PLI^^E. 

THEOrGHOUT the Alps one is impressed not 
only with the variety, the numbers and the vivid 
hues of the flowers, but with the exhaustless vi- 
tality of the plants that produce them. Under 
the most favorable conditions their lives are, like 
those of the people themselves, a fierce struggle, 
a combat that never ceases, against every oppos- 
ing influence. Their summer is a short one, a 
few uncertain weeks at most, and of these they 
must make the best profit they can. They must 
rise quickly from the earth, put forth their leaves, 
hasten their blossoms and ripen their seeds, before 
winter comes down to blight their labors, bring- 
ing premature death in his train, as he does to 
many. Yet in spite of every disaster, multitudes 
survive, and these are ever pushing onwards and 
upwards, covering an ever and ever wider ex- 
panse, yielding to no obstacle and disheartened by 
no adversity. One's attention is especially drawn 
to this in the Upper Engadine, from the close vi- 
cinity of the mountains and the comparative ease 
with which the loftiest resorts of vegetation can 
be reached. 



ALPINE FLOWERS. 



85 



There is scarcely a peak so high, or so deeply 
covered with snow, that at least a score of speci- 
mens have not seized upon some nook or recess 
screened from icy winds, and there year after year 
gone through all the phases of their wondrous life. 
Within a few paces of the top of the Piz Lan- 
guard, which rises to a height of nearly 11,000 
feet, I gathered a bouquet of more than a dozen 
different species. Near the summit of the Piz 
Tschierva, of which the sharp crest overlooks 
Pontresina from an altitude of 800 feet greater 
than the above summit, one notices a flourishing 
colony of the Alpine ranunculus, with flowers 
opening as fully and as joyously, and shining as 
brilliantly, as anywhere in Switzerland. What 
sudden vigor of life must the sun infuse into these 
children of desolation and almost polar cold, to 
tempt them from that sepulchre where they lie 
buried for at least five sixths of the twelvemonth ! 
And what shall be said of the gentians which 
brave the rigors of the weather at the same eleva- 
tion on the summit of the Drouaz, and with such 
radiance of blue that they appear to reflect from 
their petals the luminous azure of the sky above 
them ? ^ With these intrepid pioneers, though it 

1 As the heat of the sun^s rays increases with the elevation of 
the spot on which they fall, a mountain summit is more favor- 
ably situated in this respect than the country around it. On low 
grounds the surface temperature is generally less than that of the 
air, while on the highlands the reverse is true. Hence the soil of 
the upper Alps, though in many parts thin and scanty, is warm, 
and so continues throughout the year, the deep snows of winter 



86 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



never ascends to quite so vast a height, is to be 
classed the Alpine rose, as it is popularly termed, 
though it is, in scientific language, a rhododendron,"^ 

serving to check the radiation that would otherwise take place. 
Sheltered slopes, however lofty, with a southern aspect, are, there- 
fore, not ill adapted to the growth of many small and hardy 
plants, whose widely-spreading rootlets revel in a vital glow, which 
insures their vigor of habit despite the nipping air. As the snow 
in such locations generally melts first from within, at the points 
where it touches the earth, gentians, soldanellas, and various other 
species, are often noticed in profuse bloom under their wintry 
mantle, or, if not in bloom, at least sending out an abundance of 
little gayly-colored buds, ready to expand at the first opportunity, 
which they frequently do within a few hours after the snow has 
disappeared. 

Not only plants, but some animals, manage to lead a happy and 
flourishing life on these vast and forbidding heights. A little 
field-mouse, dignified by science with the name Arvicola nivalis, 
of which he is happily ignorant, is found in numbers at an eleva- 
tion of 12,000 feet on the Einster-Aarhorn and on several other 
mountains but little lower. His winter is a long one, but he en- 
dures it unharmed, never becoming torpid nor descending into the 
valleys, but enjoying cozy quarters in a burrow not over a foot 
in depth, which he tunnels in the soil. 

Those who may happen to feel an interest in the above and in 
similar subjects, will derive both pleasure and profit from an able 
and entertaining essay, entitled Des Causes du Froid sur les Hautes 
Montagues, by Charles Martins, in the Album von Comhe-Varin, 
published in memory of Theodore Parker and Hans Lorenz Kuch- 
ler. The writer, a devotee of the Alps, has explored them with 
much energy and thoroughness. Referring to the great altitude 
of many flowering plants, he says, Aux Grands-Mulets, rochers 
de protogine schisteuse surgissant au milieu des glaciers du Mont- 
Blanc, a 3050 metres au-dessus de la mer, et par consequent a 340 
metres au-dessus de la limite des neiges perpetuelles, j^ai encore 
pu cueillir 19 phanerogames." 

1 This word per se is quite as much of a misnomer as Alpine 
rose," since it means in Greek " rose-tree/' and was probably first 



ALPINE FLOWERS. 



87 



the true Alpine rose being an eglantine. Far np 
the ravines and precipices, from where we stand 
we perceive its glowing flowers that spring from 
clumps and broad masses of foliage till they are lost 
in the distance. A thousand feet higher a steep 
and rocky declivity is covered with them. They 
face the north and are beyond the farthest trees. 
They have no protection from bitter blasts, and 
during the winter, when the snow lies ten feet 
deep and more in the valleys below, their slippery 
incline allows it no lodgment, and they are de- 
prived even of this defense against the cold. Yet 
here, as in many other exposed localities, they 
hold their own and fight it out bravely, improving 
every opportunity of mounting higher, and con- 
testing each step with the pines and the larches. 
It is the Alpine plant par excellence. Like the 
Swiss themselves, it resents every attempt to en- 
slave it, and will die rather than submit to culti- 
vation, even in its own country. 

" Ein Bliimchen bliiht in Lieblichkeit 
Auf hoher Alpen Riicken ; 
Es weiss der Myrthe dunkles Kleid 
Mit Kosenroth zu schmiicken. 

Doch treu dem hohen Yaterland, 

Mag^s nicht in Beeten prangen ; 
Noch gaVs in keines Ereier's Hand 

Sein freies Herz gefangen." 

employed by the ancients to designate the oleander. The Swiss 
never make use of either of these names, the inhabitants of each 
district generally bestowing some distinctive epithet to suit their 
own tastes and ideas. 



88 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



As it climbs tlie rhododendron grows smaller 
and smaller, thus adapting itself to its situation 
and gathering its forces together. Stooping more 
closely to the earth, each bush also entwines itself 
more firmly with its neighbors. The bark be- 
comes hard, black and leathery ; the branches 
shorter and more angular, knotted at times, and 
tortuous. The glabrous leaves, darkly shining 
and on the under surface dense with rusty hairs, 
gather compactly at the ends of the shoots, over- 
lapping each other like the scales of a pine cone, 
and clinging round the buds to protect them till 
the latest moment before they venture out into 
the blast. It is ever the child of the mountains, 
and resorts to the plains but here and there, as if 
merely for a brief sojourn. It lives and thrives 
only in that vigorous and inspiriting air which 
moves over the hills like the Spirit of God " upon 
the face of the waters." Three fourths, and more, 
of the year it husbands its resources and prepares 
itself for the summer. The buds expand very 
slowly, as if from timidity, or perhaps coyly 
yielding to the smiles of the sun. But when they 
finally reveal the full splendor of their bloom, 
what a glow of color ! What exquisite contrasts 
of vivid green and red ! What intoxication of su- 
perabundant health and vigor ! One meets with 
this plant in every part of Switzerland, but no- 
where does it show such profusion of foliage, such 
variety of graphic tints, ranging from a pale pink 
to the darkest rose, as in the Upper Engadine, 



THE CEMBRA PINE. 



89 



The people offer it their tribute of admiration 
by terming it in their simple way "fliu* hella^^^ 
beautiful flower. Nowhere else does it cover such 
vast spaces. Nowhere does it continue so long in 
bloom. In that region it has even a quite obvious 
scent, which is seldom apparent in other parts ; 
not very distinct in a bouquet, but from a large 
cluster very perceptible, with a slightly wild and 
bitter flavor, piquant and refreshing. At Pontre- 
sina one sees the Alpine rose in full perfection, and 
on those rocky steeps, if anywhere, one appreciates 
the rich preeminence of its beauty. 

Side by side with this belle of the Alps, and as 
fearlessly ever pressing on and upward, we meet 
with the Piniis Cemlra^'^ often termed the stone 

1 It is not known when this musical title was first conferred 
upon this species of evergreen^ nor can the word itself be traced 
to any certain origin, though Kock in his Dendrologie regards it 
as Italian. The Yal Cembra, which leads from the Brenner Pass, 
has borne this name from time immemorial, and as remains — pre- 
sumably Etruscan, though some savants of late have claimed for 
them an antiquity far greater even than that — have been found 
there, it is probable that the word Cembra came into use many 
ages before the Christian era. As applied to the tree above 
mentioned, it is thus printed in the works of Dalechamps and 
Matthioli, botanists of the sixteenth century, while Camerarius 
and Tabernsemontanus at the same date employ the form Cem- 
bro. It is now recognized by science as Pinus Cembra helvetica, 
though its popular appellation varies according to the locality 
where it grows. In the Engadine it is called Arolla ; in Tyrol, 
Aphernousli ; in the Oberland, Arve ; in Dauphine, nearly every 
village bestows upon it a different name. The French term it 
Pin-aivier, and in some districts Ceinbrot. Monsieur H. Baillon, 
in his Dictionnaire de Botanique, credits Spach with deriving 
Cembra from the Arabic sanouher, which means ginger. This is 



90 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



pine of Switzerland. Among the grander mount- 
ains is its natural habitat, and on those of the En- 
gadine it assumes its most complete development, 
enriching the most barren headlands and even the 
craggy ledges of the cliffs with its towering wealth 
of foliage. It is the more valued in that region from 
the fact that no other tree will endure the severity 
of the climate and the fearful exposure at so great 
a height without injury, except the larch. This 
equals, but never surpasses, the Cembra, while the 
loss of its leaves during the cold months seriously 
detracts from both its beauty and its usefulness. 
Scarce any spot is too unsheltered or too sterile 
for this prince of the peaks, this " moody Dane " 
of the woods. Standing erect in his strength, he 
dallies with the storms and defies their utmost 
wrath. Overhanging the cold obstruction of the 
glacier, as it were in disdain, the Cembra even 

a gratuitous and very improbable assumption, due entirely to his 
own invention, since Spach says nothing of the sort. It sounds 
very much like a philological mot, more spicy and specious than 
wise. To Baron d'Osten-Sacken, whose erudition has shed light 
upon many departments of science besides his o^^ti peculiar do- 
main of entomology, I am indebted for a theory which would 
seem to be both ingenious and original : Cenibro, or Ceinbrot, is 
a local designation of the tree, and the question remains about the 
etymology of that. If I were permitted a suggestion of my own, 
I would venture the following : The German name of the tree is 
Zirbel, or Zirbelkiefer. I find in Weigand that Zirbel is derived 
from the Middle High German zirben, to move in a circle, wirbeln ; 
also from the Old High German sih zerban, which bears the same 
meaning. This refers, of course, to the turbinate shape of the 
cone. jMay not zei'ban and ceinbrot be etymologically related ? " 



THE CEMBRA PINE. 



91 



maintains itself where the ground is perpetually 
frozen. Urged by an unfailing instinct, it thrusts 
its roots into the profoundest rifts and chinks in 
the rocks, rejecting no foothold, however slight, 
and tenaciously grappling with everything that 
may strengthen it for the warfare in which its life 
is passed. In the valleys it dwindles, and, like 
the giant Sequoia of California, is seldom seen to 
grow spontaneously at a less altitude than 6000 
feet. On the Stelvio we find it thrifty and vigor- 
ous as high as 7900 feet, and on the Bernina at 
7600. It is the offspring of hardship and endless 
friction, and enjoys a fierce and sombre delight in 
transmuting the very stones into verdure, while 
it draws robust and manly endurance from every 
elemental terror. It is slow of growth and its an- 
nual rate of progress rarely exceeds twelve or fif- 
teen inches. It is the slowest of all pines, in fact. 
As it is obliged to extract a livelihood where other 
trees would soon perish in gnarled and stunted 
poverty, it must cautiously feel its way and dares 
not project its tender shoots far into the biting at- 
mosphere. There are superb forests of the Cem- 
bra in the Engadine, finer than any elsewhere 
seen. Centuries old, as they frequently are, they 
stand erect and unscathed, the types of final suc- 
cess extorted from many an obstacle, and quicken- 
ing into a significant and solemn presence that fire 
from the heart of things which nature with subtle 
passion hides smoldering within her breast for the 
refreshment of the greatly striving. 



92 



GLEAXIXGS FROM POyiRESINA. 



The aspect of the Cembra gives one the impres- 
sion of a rough and stalwart warrior, well-pro- 
tected at all points and with cool defiance await- 
ing and ready to repel attack. This is appar- 
ent in the proudly erect and stocky trunk ; in 
the brawny arms firmly thrust out with aggress- 
ive mien ; in the darkly stern expression of its 
foliage, compact of long triangular lance-like 
needles, which at times reflect the sunshine with 
a dull, steely lustre. This suggestion of force and 
untamed virility extends also to its cones, which 
are dark-brown, egg-shaped, short and provided 
with shining and resinous scales, lying in close 
contact one over another, like the shields of the 
Macedonian phalanx. These grow only at the 
top of the tree, which does not taper into a point 
like most of its family, but is somewhat rounded 
in the shape of a dome. The higher and more 
perilous its situation, the more wonderfully does it 
adapt itself to the troubles that threaten it, and 
the more resinous and balsamic does it become, 
thus coating itself with an impenetrable armor. 
In winter the leaves press more strenuously against 
the branches and fold themselves more closely 
round the tender shoots, that they may be saved 
from the weight of the snow as well as from chill 
and mutilation.^ 

^ The Cembra was a favorite with Byron, who often mentions 
it in his letters and journals. Such lines as these, in Childe 
Harold, — 

" From the black pines that were his shade on high,*' 



THE CEMBRA PINE. 



93 



Having once attained its prime, the Cembra, 
if unmolested by violent hands, towers aloft for 
centuries, and hardly seems to share the dissolu- 
tion which Time deals out unceasingly to the very 
Alps above it, whose crumbling fragments are 
daily strewn at its feet. More enduring than any 
other member of its family, it retains its vital 
forces to the last and offers a tenacious resistance 
to every approach of decay. It is the only spe- 
cies of evergreen, which, when shattered or over- 
thrown, sends out shoots from its base. The 
traveler still sees in the valley of Grindelwald the 
remains of one of these venerable monarchs that 
some twelve months since was struck by lightning. 
Its trunk recorded an age of fifteen hundred years, 
and yet, 43lasted and rent as it has been, it still 
continues the struggle for existence and proffers a 
few green boughs, as it were from the very grave.^ 

But from their nature will the tannen grow 
Loftiest on loftiest and least sheltered rocks," — 

and others, attest that it was often in his thoughts. Naturally in 
its triste and hard antagonism he saw the welcome image of his 
own sorrows. His alien spirit, invincible^ though spurned of his 
race, tainted the Cembra with the bitter flavor of his own person- 
ality. To him it was the proud and conscious genius, crying in 
the wilderness, meeting scorn with scorn, yet ever mounting to 
the skies in lordly exaltation. Had the poet been gifted with 
broader and more healthy sympathies, this noble presence would 
have revealed to him a richer life and a far deeper meaning. 

1 The ancient Romans believed that no pine when once prostrated 
ever gave any further proof of life. Hence arose the saying, " Pini 
in morem extirpare^' — to root out like a pine tree, — which signi- 
fied that total destruction with which they so often visited their 
enemies. 



94 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



In its pride of place this mountain victor recalls 
impressively to mind the passage of Holy Writ, 
" For as the days of a tree are the days of my 
people." 

The Cembra is remarkable for its flowers, which 
are of a bright purple, and larger and more beauti- 
ful than those of any other of its kindred. They 
make their advent in May, forming a cluster at the 
top, and the cones ripen in November, during some 
weeks of their youth showing a bloom which resem- 
bles that of a ripe plum.^ 

The seeds are of greater size than those of any 
other species of pine, except the famous umbrella 
pine of Italy. Each cone bears from thirty to sixty, 

1 The Greeks and Romans placed the pine cone over the last 
resting-places of their dead as the symbol of immortality. From 
the treasures of the whole vegetable world they could not have 
chosen an emblem more appropriate or more suggestive of eternal 
wisdom. Like Augustus, it is handsome at every age, while the 
perfect symmetry of its parts and their wonderful adaptation will 
never fail to excite the admiration of every thoughtful mind. The 
Egyptians employed the cedar blossom for the same purpose, and 
the oldest story in existence, which has come down to us in a 
mummy case on a papyrus, speaks of a certain Batan who was 
killed by his brother, whereupon his soul was inclosed in the flow- 
ers of a cedar and therein continued to dwell forever. Whether 
the Cembra was known to the Egyptians is impossible at this^ day 
to be discovered ; but it corresponds more fully to the description 
of their cedar that has come down to us than any other, especially 
in the matter of its flowers. The Cembra is often termed the 
cedar of the Alps, and displays a striking resemblance to this spe- 
cies in many of its characteristics. It would appear scarcely prob- 
able that the Egyptian tree could have been the cedar of Lebanon, 
as various savants have attempted to prove, since the blossoms of 
the latter are peculiarly small and inconspicuous. 



THE CEMBRA PINE. 



95 



thougli the number is considerably larger every 
third year. The very hard shell incloses a white 
kernel, which is savory to the taste and has a per- 
fume like that of the citron. It is very unctuous, 
and three pounds of the seed will afford one third 
that weight of oil, which exceeds the production of 
any other seed known. This is wonderfully fat- 
tening and nutritious and is much used in soups. 
It is also burned in lamps, giving forth a fragrant 
aroma. It is, moreover, regarded as efficacious in 
lung complaints and to a certain extent takes the 
place of cod-liver oil when thus employed among 
us, having the additional merit of being quite pal- 
atable. The nuts of the Cembra are the dates of 
the Alps. They are thought a delicacy at even- 
ing parties, and offer the unusual combination of 
a "bonne bouche" and a "piece de resistance," 
since the shell is so stony that the operation of 
freeing the meat requires not a little skill and 
strength. 1 With the object of effecting this more 
rapidly and agreeably, gatherings, like our husking 
bees, are formed, at which the young men and 
maidens carry on a lively contest, brightening 

1 " The sweetness of the pine seeds, joined to the difficulty of 
extracting them, and the length of time necessary for their ripen- 
ing, did not escape the notice of the emblem-writers of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries. "With them it was the favorite 
emblem of the happy results of persevering labor. Camerarius, a 
contemporary of Shakespeare, gives a pretty plate of a man hold- 
ing a fir-cone, with this moral : ' Sic ad virtutem et honestatem 
et laudabiles actiones non nisi per labores ac varias difficultates, 
perveniri potest, at postea sequantur suavissimi f ructus.' " (Plant- 
lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare. By H. N. Ellacombe.) 



96 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



their somewhat scanty and halting wits at the ex- 
pense of their fingers. 

The wood of the Cembra is very soft, as is the 
case with the cedar of Lebanon, and is thus easily 
carved.^ It is most finely veined and the grain is 
so slight as to be almost imperceptible. Hence it 
is employed in vast quantities for the manufacture 
of those Swiss and Tyrolese toys and other fanciful 
objects which are so familiar to all European tour- 
ists. The natives frequently avail themselves of 
it for wainscoting, and most of the rooms of well- 
to-do people in the Engadine are thus lined. In 
the chateau of Tarasp, built more than five hun- 
dred years ago, the chambers were originally walled 
with this material, which still remains in perfect 
preservation with no apparent shrinkage or lessen- 
ing of weight or perfume. It is the more popular 
for this purpose on account of the agreeable scent 
which arises from the abundance of its resin, for 
which all moths and other insects have a mortal 
aversion and will not go near it. This rather 
increases with age, and is a healthy tonic. After 
the lapse of years the wood acquires a reddish tint, 
which is a refreshing rest for the eye. 

All these claims on their consideration have 
given the Cembra a strong hold on the gratitude 

1 Her timber is for various uses good ; 

The carver she supplies with useful wood ; 
She makes the painter^s fading colors last : 
A table she affords us, and repast : 
E'en while we feast, her oil our lamps supplies.'' 

(The Walnut. Cowlej.) 



THE CEMBRA PINE. 



and regard of the Swiss, especially in the Engadine 
and other high valleys, which without it, there is 
no exaggeration in saying, would be almost, if not 
quite, uninhabitable. In many parts the people 
look upon it with respect and veneration almost 
amounting to superstition, as the Hollanders re- 
gard the stork. They plant it near their houses, 
as prone to conciliate good luck and prosperity. 
In the rural economy of Switzerland it takes a 
leading place, and on heights too exposed to be 
otherwise productive, they are continually setting 
out young plantations with a thrift that is not 
limited to the claims of the moment, but liberally 
provides for the future. The value of a wood of 
this tree cannot be over-estimated. Not only does 
it afford protection from avalanches and mountain 
torrents, not only does it slowly filter down the 
fertile rains and temper the wrath of the elements, 
not only does it purify and sweeten the air, add- 
ing to its bracing vigor many a hidden element of 
health and strength, but it is a direct source of 
pecuniary profit. So well are the principles of 
forestry understood in Switzerland, that every tree 
is made to pay its way and give a return in the 
shape of fruit, trimmings, thinnings- out, and other- 
wise. Apart from all other considerations, a sure 
provision is thus made in many sections of the 
country for the destitute class, who derive such ob- 
vious benefits therefrom, that they are almost sup- 
ported by the annual produce of the woods. In the 
absence of these, great suffering would necessarily 



98 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



ensue. Karl Kasthofer in ''Der Lehrer im Walde " 
exclaims, Think of an Alpine community whose 
authorities one or two centuries ago had planted 
on the steep slopes of the public lands a Cembra 
forest of a hundred acres I Certainly, from the 
returns of this alone all the poor could have been 
supplied; all the roads and bridges could have 
been maintained, and suitable schoolmasters pro- 
vided for the youth of the Tillage I " 

Nothing can be more enticing to the imagina- 
tion than to wander among these stern, memorial 
trees, dwelling apart in aromatic solitude far on 
the utmost verge of lonely lands.^ Each figure, a 
noble type, wrapped in dark robes of contempla- 
tion, which dimly hide its coat of mail, stands like 
an armed baron ready for peace or war : austere 
and dignified, scorning protection, conscious of 
power to protect. United in an iron league, this 
haughty Parliament conceal the tumult of their 
souls in a portentous calm, a calm deep as that 
which soothes the summit of Olympus, as if aware 
that one hasty word might arouse an earthquake 
of wrath and send thousands to the domains of 
death. At times bending mysteriously toward 
each other and yielding to emotions swollen into 
utterance by press of thought, they exchange a 

1 The pine has from the earliest ages taken a strong hold upon 
the minds of men, and poets have ever regarded it as an inspiring 
image, and a fertile source of melodious verse. In the great Ac- 
cadian epic of Gisdhubar, the hero of the sun, written more than 
two thousand years before Christ, the writer describes " the land of 
the pine trees, the seat of the gods, the sanctuary of the spirits/' 



THE CEMBRA PINE. 



99 



few whispers in a hoarse undertone, trembling 
with the very agitation of their enforced restraint. 
Fit companion of the glorious sovereignty of the 
peaks, true to his far-reaching lineage and the 
nobility of a name untarnished by time, each in 
the greatness of his claims feels strong to dictate 
even to the imperious majesty that towers above 
on its great white throne, resplendent with excess 
of light ; yet still with loyal worship in their 
hearts for the glory beyond that icy lustre, and 
ready to break out into a low Te Deum of solemn 
adoration, joining their voices to the sons of God, 
while the faint undertone of distant harps com- 
pletes the melody wherewith nature blends this 
life with that beyond. 

" Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and 
with all the company of heaven, we laud and mag- 
nify thy glorious Name." 

Thus broaden the realms of thought in the soci- 
ety of nature, till we seem on the frontiers of eter- 
nity, while the world dwindles into a faint per- 
spective, and we anticipate in our souls the glories 
of the all-hail hereafter. Thus " confederate with 
vocal pines," we realize that 

Earth crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God.'' 



CHAPTEE VII. 



THE EN^GLISH CHUECH AT POKTEESINA. 

The English have as yet provided no edifice 
for their own worship at Pontresina, though more 
of their nation are accustomed to frequent that 
village than of all others combined, the Germans 
ranking next in number, and after them the Amer- 
icans. From this point of view it is not so much 
favored as Geneva, Zermatt, St. Moritz and some 
other popular resorts in Switzerland, where the 
subjects of Queen Victoria have reared perma- 
nent and attractive memorials of their presence. 
Though small, these are, almost without excep- 
tion, model structures in their way, being built of 
the most durable material and generally in good 
taste, fitly harmonizing with the scenery around 
them, while the architecture often displays elabo- 
rate details both without and within. Your Briton 
is a born worshiper and rather than be without 
a household god will adore a duke. He likes to 
have everything handsome about him, and con- 
siders it eminently proper that a Protestant, 
an English, and a reasonable religion " should be 
well accommodated, and this abroad quite as much 
as at home, since its claims are thus more promi- 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA. 101 



nently asserted, and its superiority more strongly 
impressed on the world. The entrance to his par- 
adise cannot be made too inviting. As the result 
of these feelings the monuments of his faith are 
now scattered here and there over the whole Con- 
tinent. They are typical not only of British sen- 
timent, but of our age, since they serve to record 
the various phases of religious progress from its 
commencement. At first the native inhabitants 
looked on them with aversion, while the authori- 
ties tolerated them merely from motives of self- 
interest ; afterwards they eyed them with pity or 
scorn ; now they pass them with simple indiffer- 
ence. As to any possible harm from the principles 
taught within their walls, there never was the least 
cause for fear, since the great majority of the peo- 
ple are too firmly wedded to their own creeds to 
care for those of others, especially of the English, 
who are not so much adored in Europe as to win 
many disciples to the tenets of which they are the 
visible fruit. 

Our transatlantic cousins are great reformers 
after their fashion, and for many years have 
evinced a spirit, in regard to the improvement of 
other nations, which, if not apostolic, is at least a 
fair substitute therefor, so far as zeal and energy 
are concerned. Though imbued with a worldly 
taint and commonly proceeding from mere selfish 
avidity for their own comfort, it certainly abounds 
in valuable results. From churches to beds, noth- 
ing has escaped them. By their own incessant ex- 



102 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



ample they have sought to reintroduce among the 
French the long forgotten use of that soap which 
their Gallic ancestors first revealed to the world, 
while no effort has been wanting to prevail upon 
the Germans by similar influences to return to 
those baths which were so popular with that nation 
in the days of Tacitus, — statim e somno^lavan- 
tur,^^ Unfortunately their practice has not be- 
come contagious, though could they have gone a 
little further, and convinced the rest of the world 
that cleanliness is actually an essential element of 
godliness, they would long before this have been 
welcomed as the lights of a new era. But the re- 
sults of continental teaching in our day point to 
quite a different belief, and this doctrine is not yet 
likely to meet the popular approval. Even now, 
after so many years of bright example, if the Eng- 
lish were to absent themselves from the Continent 
for a decade, a large proportion of the bath tubs, 
soap and sponges, as well as many other Anglo- 
Saxon provisions for personal ease and neatness, 
would vanish with them. From the churches, 
however, it is fair to infer that lasting benefit may 
yet accrue. They are solid facts, daily present, 
obvious to the sight, and not to be smuggled away 
by human contrivance. Few brains, however dull, 
can avoid the effect of impressions many times re- 
peated, and even an ignorant peasantry may be 
beguiled into the tender of an unwitting homage 
to objects with which they have no natural sympa- 
thy. In the course of centuries they will, doubt- 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA. 103 



less, come to appreciate the difference between the 
present village church, as one sees it in Switzer- 
land, for example, — cold and dark, dingy and re- 
pulsive, — and the latest achievement of a skillful 
architect, which unites convenience to refinement, 
while on every hand it reveals such incentives to 
a higher life as culture has been able to draw from 
the treasury of nature to offer at the shrine of re- 
ligion. 

To tell the truth, the continental nations, did 
they but know it, have a personal interest in these 
Protestant churches, and if they were much given 
to reflection, might view them in the light of bread 
cast upon the waters, since they largely contributed 
to the wealth that has reared them ; though, to be 
sure, had they been consulted in the matter, it 
would have returned in another shape. To a dis- 
interested observer, there seems a sort of expiation 
on the part of the English, not devoid of a flavor 
of grim humor, in thus employing a modicum of 
the profits they derived in time past from the vari- 
ous commodities with which they have inundated 
the whole of Europe. At any rate it is probably 
the sole return the thrifty islanders will ever make 
to their benighted customers for the sums they 
have paid for willow-pattern plates,^ cleverly 

1 Most readers will hardly need any explanation of my refer- 
ence to this peculiar product of British industry, certainly not 
those who have been on the other side of the Atlantic and wit- 
nessed the extensive use there made of it. It is more common, 
if possible, in Europe than it was some twenty-five years since 
among us, and not only there, but all over the world, one meets it 



104 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



adorned with chaotic variations on a Chinese 
theme, knives and forks with ivory handles ingen- 
iously adapted from bone ; cheap cottons, well 
sized and seductive to the eye ; gilt toys and but- 
tons ; paper oil-paintings ; wares of Britannia 
metal, and the myriad other plausible devices with 
which Birmingham and Manchester have so long 
enticed the world and filled their own pockets. 
But for this boon their customers should have the 
grace to be thankful under the circumstances. 
Even though in the end they have nothing to 
show for their money but churches, and heretical 
ones at that, they ought to receive them in a 
proper frame of mind, and remember that — 

" The bread comes back in many days 
An' buttered, tu, fer sartin." 

at every turn. From this article alone the amounts poured into 
the English coffers must have been enormous. For many genera- 
tions millions upon millions of these plates have been spread over 
the Continent, and the mere thought of their number is enough to 
make the brain reel. Had they all come at once, they would have 
covered Europe a foot deep. The source of its popularity it would 
be difficult to define, the more so that it is neither very handsome 
nor remarkably strong. In all probability this arose from its 
cheapness and the persistency with which its claims were urged 
by the makers. The history of the rise and progress of this pecul- 
iarly British institution would form an attractive book. 

Miss Frances Power Cobbe has already thought it worthy of a 
poem, in which she does ample credit to its universal presence, 
and the tenacity with which it still holds its own and makes no 
sign of surrender : — 

"But never — never change shall reach 
One thing in mortal state ; 
One only thing — I see it now — 

A WiLLOW-PATTEEN PLATE." 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA. 105 



At Samaden, four miles from Pontresina, a 
small edifice was erected a few years since for the 
service of the Church of England. It is situated 
on the side of a lofty hill, near enough to its foot 
to be accessible, and yet at a slight elevation above 
the town, which it overlooks like a guardian angel. 
From a point some rods beyond our hotel we could 
see it quite clearly. There are not many English 
who are in the habit of staying long at this place, 
and the building was scarcely needed, nor would 
it now be in existence but for the labors of one 
man, a devout and beneficent soul, who spent a 
summer at Samaden, and subsequently presented 
it with this proof of his philanthropy, having both 
given liberally himself and secured aid from others. 
It wins much admiration despite its minuteness, 
and is a charming ornament to the landscape, the 
position making its beauty quite conspicuous. A 
yery wren among churches, a bishop in his para- 
phernalia would fill it to overflowing ; and yet so 
excellent are the arrangements of the interior, that 
even the prosiest sermon might be heard with 
much alleviation. The material is stone quarried 
near by, and this has been used to such advantage 
that one quickly detects, notwithstanding all ab- 
sence of pretension in the plan, many of the feat- 
ures of a larger fabric. In fact, the tourist seldom 
encounters so diminutive a structure, which dis- 
closes so much character in the design, and wrought 
out with such boldness. It strikes one, somehow, 

as merely the germ of future splendor, as if more 
5* 



106 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESlNA, 



were meant than met the ej-e, and we should not 
be greatly surprised, did it ultimately expand into 
the imposing majesty of a cathedral. There are 
arches and buttresses, bosses and finials, niches 
and stained glass, with other suggestions of ecclesi- 
astical grandeur. Two gargoyles, even, grinning 
hideously, eject into the closerie the water spurned 
by the roof. The spectator is lost in conjecture, 
and wonders if the Seven Lamps of Architecture 
may not have lately had an addition to the 
family. 

This cozy and pleasing sinecure, this compact 
little symbol of clerical welfare, is in aggravat- 
ing contrast with the parish church of Pontresina, 
in which the English are now kindly allowed to 
perform their religious duties. This is very large 
and very plain, and the huge blocks of granite em- 
ployed in its construction are none the less un- 
sightly from the whitewash with which they w^ere 
once bedaubed, but which the rain has here and 
there scaled off in dingy blotches. The tall, square 
tower, of imposing size, is crowned by a dome, in 
shape like an inverted turnip. This is covered 
with tin, which occasionally glitters in the sun- 
shine with considerable lustre, though the envious 
rust that has streaked it sadly diminishes the full 
bravery of the effect. It serves, however, to em- 
phasize one of the most popular among their native 
proverbs, "A nun ais tuot or que chi gluscJia^^' — 
all is not gold that glitters. The interior is ex- 
quisitely forlorn and barren. It is as naked as the 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA. 107 



truth and as hard as the face of Old Jacob 
Stock." The walls are lined with unpainted pine, 
deeply browned by age and dirt. Their numerous 
cracks and fissures would seem to show that the 
hundreds of long and dreary solemnities in which 
they had been constrained to take part had forced 
irrepressible yawns from the very boards. The 
pews are high and stiff, and every Sunday the 
native congregation sit up to their necks in cold 
baths of Calvinistic theology. There is no organ, 
and such instrumental music as they have comes 
from a small melodeon, much demoralized by its 
journey from Zurich, over steep passes, though 
evidently once responsive with harmonious issues. 
To judge from its tones it still labors under a sense 
of ill-treatment, perhaps from chronic dyspepsia. 
The villagers never molest it, deriving what solace 
and inspiration they need from the sound of their 
own voices, which satisfies them and disconcerts 
no one else, though the English stirred up their 
pure minds through its aid with weekly assidu- 
ity. The bare wooden seats are as chilly as they 
are rough, and one takes active exercise by the 
simple process of sitting. The windows are small 
and high under the eaves. The blinking light 
feels its way in with a cautious reluctance, and the 
obscurity recalls a catacomb. There is no attempt 
at ventilation ; only now and then an open sash 
lets down a bleak shaft of icy vapor. The mar- 
tyrs of the church are frozen at the stake, and 
denied the luxury of being burnt, as elsewhere. 



108 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



The floor is of stone, and there are no carpets, nor 
is there a stove, fireplace, or other means of pro- 
viding warmth, even in the dead of winter. A 
dungeon for the confinement of religion ; a tomb 
in summer ; a frozen purgatory at other seasons. 

This is a fair specimen of the churches in the 
Engadine. They are all equally old and ugly, un- 
couth and comfortless. At intervals throughout 
the valley they stand forth like aged and well- 
worn ghosts, who have appeared many times too 
often for their own advantage, though few can 
deny that they seem perfectly in keeping with the 
stern and forbidding doctrines taught in them, and 
with the venerable fossils that still cling to them. 
As to the worshipers, they- are quite content with 
them from turret to foundation, and show no de- 
sire for any improvement. The stern and prolix 
discourses through which their fathers sat and 
shivered to the bitter end are good enough for 
their descendants, and Heaven forbid that they 
should make the least change in an edifice sanc- 
tified by so many ages of mental and bodily suf- 
fering. Their religion was constructed for them 
ages ago. One can discover nothing hazy or tran- 
scendental in their creed. It is hard, grim and 
full of angles : rigidly and frigidly conservative ; a 
Procrustean couch, on which they are all stretched 
from their youth up. Its founders had no idea of 
allowing their posterity to be " carried to the skies 
on flowery beds of ease." To a stranger the serv- 
ices appear peculiarly dry and forbidding, " like 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA. 109 



the remainder biscuit after a voyage," and that a 
very long one, in ballast. The language strikes 
one as a most fitting medium for the principles 
taught. It is crude and harsh. In fact, one can 
scarcely imagine any divinity, except, perchance, 
a philological one, to whom a prayer in Rumansh 
V70uld be very acceptable, though it might well be 
used to " batter the gates of Heaven." As to the 
building which is the scene of these effusions, the 
people opine that they have done enough when 
they have once renewed the coat of whitewash 
handed down to them by their grandfathers' grand- 
fathers. It is well for the present generation that 
their predecessors built of permanent material. 
Nowhere could it be more appreciated. The rustic 
taste always favors a substantial style, — Crescit 
sub pondere virtus^ — and the more closely an ob- 
ject resembles a heavy dumpling or an underdone 
potato, the better the rustici like it. From their 
food and clothing to their books and creeds, every- 
thing must have a bone in it. 

Meanwhile, pending this sojourn in the wilder- 
ness, the English frequenters of Pontresina are 
clinging to the hope of more satisfactory accom- 
modations for their worship in the future, a 
hope which an imposing subscription started some 
years since promises eventually to nourish into full 
fruition. Though, to speak the truth, the funds 
have come slowly in thus far, and of the small 
amount needed not one half has been secured, yet 
a good beginning has been made, and from this 



110 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



much more can be safely anticipated. Moreover, 
the landlord of the oldest inn has shown sufficient 
regard for his own interest to add a lot of land to 
the other donations. The list of contributors hangs 
at the side of the hotel door, and is the first thing 
that greets the eye on entrance. It is broad with 
coming possibilities and rich with the names of 
noblemen and generals, judges and prelates, and 
other grandees more or less interested in the pros- 
perity of the Establishment, together with raany 
less prominent in society ; but few of their contri- 
butions are noticeably liberal, and for the nonce, 
like the feast of the Barmecide, they represent but 
a goodly quantity of plate. 

An English subscription is a characteristic feat- 
ure of the national development, and has an inter- 
est of its own which may surprise those who are 
wont to look on such a production as rather less en- 
tertaining than even a dictionary. Should an ex- 
ample thereof survive to a remote period and be 
brought to hght by some antiquary of that day, 
no doubt it will be thought a treasure of inesti- 
mable value and the key to social and other mys- 
teries without number. Even now one of them 
well repays perusal, and the student of life ^nd 
manners finds it curious and instructive to the last 
degree. It is always a conservative document in 
its style, and invariably retains that peculiar coin, 
the guinea,^ with which Fashion acknowledges the 

1 In no country except England would they continue to use 
a coin so inconvenient and deluding as the guinea for more than 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA. 



Ill 



claims of Charity, and consents to pay a premium 
of five per cent, for the privilege of asserting her 
position before the v^orld. Thus to every pound 
is attached the inevitable shilling, like a tinkling 
cymbal, that all may be notified that the donor 
is not as other men. For the benefit of those 
not familiar with the workings of this institu- 
tion, a sample thereof is here given in the shape of 
a few representative names taken at random, with 
their donations attached. Though the remoteness 
of a Swiss hamlet might hardly be supposed to 
supply much of value to one in search of English 
idiosyncrasies, yet this peculiarity is pretty nearly 
the same everywhere. However far from their 
own homes, our foreign relations never step out of 
themselves, nor forget what they in many cases 

half a century after the authorities had announced its abolition 
and ceased to issue it from the mint ; but there its popularity was 
too great, from various reasons, for the people to give it up with- 
out a struggle. Fashion approves of its retention, as I have shown, 
and Charity because she gains thereby. The same may be said of 
the medical profession. When Sir Benjamin Brodie, the eminent 
surgeon, at the height of his success, exclaimed, stretching out 
his right hand, " This hand has felt the pressure of a hundred 
thousand guineas ! every one understood the increase of his 
annual income that resulted from the extra shilling. Emerson 
writes of the English: As their own belief in guineas is perfect, 
they readily on all occasions apply the pecuniary argument as 
final/' Tradesmen still are true to the guinea as the source of an 
infinitude of little operations, traps for the unwary, the ignorant 
or the forgetful, who fail to reflect on the difference between it 
and a pound. Altogether there is at present but a faint prospect 
that the guinea will lose its prestige, and it may still exist in 
undiminished vigor when some traveler from New " — but I really 
crave the indulgence of ray readers. 



112 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



would have done better to leave behind them. 
Like IMilton's hero, John Bull always stands ''in 
himself collected." They, more than any other 
people, were born to illustrate the truth of the 
well-known quotation from their favorite poet : — 

" Coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt/' 



Mr. Justice Chasuble £2 2s 

The Honble. and Very Reverend Eyre Gunn, Canon of 

St. Modoc's 3 3 

L. Talionis Fox, Esquire 2 2 

Major Duomo, R. A. 11 

Col. the Honble. A. Wellington Caltrop . . . 5 5 
Mr. Hutt and the Duchess Dowager of Caravanserai . 5 5 

Sir Erostratus Eawkes 3 3 

A Fiend 1 . 10 10 



This will suflBce to give a general idea of one 
phase of English philanthropy when in exalted 
standing. Scratch a Briton and you invariably 
reveal a Pharisee, and this is quite as manifest in 
his charities as elsewhere. It is as apparent with 
the poor as with the rich, and one observes it 
among the humble contributors to Mr. Spurgeon's 
objects and to others dear to Dissenters, no less 
than with lordlings. When one reads in the list 
of donors for the support of the mission to Guinea, 
for example, — 

1 It is almost superfluous to state that this word was obviously 
intended for Friend ; " but it had been written apparently with 
haste and in a foreign hand — that of a courier probably, or other 
alien, unaccustomed to the niceties of the English language — and 
thus it happened that the omission of a single letter caused "hid- 
eous ruin and combustion." 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA. 113 



A Poor Widow. Matthew x. 17 . . . . . 6d 

Two Sinners 2s 

Miss Virginia McGlnmm, Miss Cassandra McGlumm, 
Miss Euphemia McGlumm, in memory of three sis- 
ters gone before 7s 6d 

Fudge, Gudge, Pentweazle, and Grooby . . . 10s 
Corporal Snipe Is 



the sacrifices of these lowly saints in behalf of for- 
eign savages would at first strike one as truly pa- 
thetic, and yet no great degree of perspicacity is 
needed to detect a certain Pharisaism pervading 
the whole list. It is flavored with a sort of unas- 
suming pretension, if I may be allowed the ex- 
pression, as if one were to blow a penny trumpet, 
having no other available. 

At Pontresina there were English and English. 
They exhibited every shade of religious complex- 
ion, from the shining lights who never failed to 
attend the morning service at seven throughout 
the week, to the latitudinarians who rarely were 
present on any day, but mostly chose to stay in 
their rooms, even on Sunday, and write letters, or 
read Colenso on the Pentateuch, " Literature and 
Dogma," or other wicked books. Midway between 
these two extremes came the great majoritj^, the 
becomingly virtuous, who stood fast by the ancient 
landmarks, and were always present in church on 
the forenoon of the Lord's Day. These took their 
children, if they had any, — the more the better, — 
and their prayer-books. The latter they bore in a 
locked bag, or clasped tightly in their hands, per- 
chance from fear lest some Radical should slyly ab- 



114 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



stract the Creed of St. Athanasius or other " object 
of bigotry and virtue " from the collection. Every- 
thing was highly proper and conventional. Let 
us be respectable, or die. The same might be said 
of the exercises. The preaching was after the 
Old Style, many days behindhand. The sermon 
was " a cauld clatter of morality," a little smoke 
and no perceptible fire. The rector was a good 
man and a devout; an energetic believer, with de- 
cided views of his own, but too politic and en- 
dowed with too much tact to present them con- 
spicuously in his present position. One could 
never discover whether he was " High" or " Low," 
from anything in his public demeanor, and he 
steered his way between projecting opinions with 
a sagacity that nothing could surpass. He was 
ever careful not to agitate the adhesive mediocrity 
that lay spread out before him, like gruel thick 
and slab," and it was impossible to imagine more 
correct deportment under trying circumstances. 
The rank and file of the English clergy are well 
drilled, and never leave the monotony of their 
ranks. Better become a Socinian at once than 
utter anything original or brilliant. It is far more 
profitable to gently undulate a somniferous fan 
and preach as if one's hearers were subject to 
heart complaint. Ding the Jews well, but don't 
awake the sleeping squire. Thus eventually all 
may prosper, promotion may be gained, and the 
lucky incumbent may even marry the cousin of an 
earl, who will bring him a dowry of a dozen young 



ENGLISH CHURCH AT PONTRESINA, 115 

parsons and convince him of the wisdom of always 
stroking the fur in the right way. Chi lo sa ? 

Insular virtue, on the whole, bears exportation 
well. The Prince of Wales attended church on 
Sunday forenoon even in Ceylon. Outward in- 
fidels " are not numerous. The externals are in- 
variably kept up to the popular standard and go 
far to confirm the truth of Mr. Arnold's definition 
of life, as made up of three fourths conduct and 
one fourth culture. The English Sabbath, in fact, 
may be said to be composed of nothing but con- 
duct." It is proverbial for its torpid dreariness, 
and its patrons take it with them, as the people of 
Thibet carry their prayer mills. It follows the 
British drum-beat around the world. Even in 
Paris they do their best to retain every phase of 
its natural lethargy. It is in London, however, 
that the climax is reached, and the stranger who 
has had the misfortune to spend a Sunday in that 
metropolis is not likely to forget the impressions 
it left. No wonder that Bismarck termed this 
British festa eine ganz schreckliche Tyrannei." 
Walking forth, one finds himself suddenly in a 
cemetery. Piety and prosperity quit their tombs 
for a time and primly stalk abroad. In an hour 
or so even this excitement fades away. Every 
one retires decently and in order. Solitude and 
desolation reign supreme, and the day finally dies 
miserably from sheer want of vitality. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



SU:^sDAY AT PONTBESIXA. 

To most continental tourists, especially those of 
sensitive feelings, the sight of an English congre- 
gation in flagrante delicto is far from attractive 
and seldom edifying. Their worship is the per- 
fection of mechanical devotion, sincere, doubtless, 
while it lasts, but with a matter-of-fact business 
air which suggests well-drilled recruits. They are 
all attached to the same machinery, and rise and 
fall at regular intervals with the unmeaning pre- 
cision of automatons. A crowd of dull men and 
heavy women, ill dressed, satisfied with themselves 
and with no one else. Religious Turveydrops. 
Propriety and respectability in strait-jackets. 
Every face is plated with the sober self-compla- 
cency of well-bred piety, and expresses nothing 
else. No emotions are allowed on the premises. 
There is a becoming ton in everything, even in 
the observances of religion, and no visible sign 
thereof is permitted but the consciousness of su- 
perlative rectitude. Viewing this, one feels, " how 
awful gooduess is." When Lord Chesterfield 
wrote, One of the most important points of life 
is decencj", which is to do what is proper and 



SUNDAY AT PONTBESINA. 



117 



when it is proper," a fervent, though subdued, amen 
came from the very heart of the nation. To that 
maxim their allegiance has never wavered, at least 
so far as concerns their demeanor when together. 

Unhappily this exquisite sense of propriety is 
not so manifest when they are apart from each 
other, and the individual is free from any restraint 
on his self-assertion. There is a wide difference, 
as one sees them on the Continent, between " the 
English " and " the Englishman." The latter, by 
himself and beyond the social tyranny of his own 
people, gives loose rein to those inborn peculiar- 
ities, both mental and physical, which when with 
his countrymen he is obliged to keep in abeyance, 
and generally consults his own pleasure without 
the least regard for the feelings or comfort of any 
one else. Thus he is continually displaying that 
habitual coarseness of fibre characteristic of his 
race, while he exacts a species of compensation 
for the checks that commonly surround him. It 
is easy to understand why the Times," replying 
to sundry well-deserved criticisms on the behavior 
of its readers while abroad, was impelled to admit 
that the ''English ideal is that every one should be 
free to do and to look just as he likes ; " meaning, 
of course, by the words " every one," every Eng- 
lishman out of his island, for at home the very 
opposite is the fact, and no nation is more closely 
hedged in by belittling forms or more inclined to 
look upon conventionalities as great principles. 
But in the matter of dress it must be allowed that 



118 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



there is no distinction either of time or place, and, 
whether in their own country or out of it, Enghsh 
men and English women are ever attired with the 
same eccentricity and the same bad taste. Obvi- 
ously they have no sympathy with the Emerso- 
nian idea that " the sense of being perfectly well 
dressed gives an inward tranquillity which it is not 
in the power of religion to bestow," nor are they 
so constituted that they could detect any meaning 
therein. Hence they easily and naturally take 
refuge in the next best substitute, the observance 
of the proprieties," Sabbath and other, which 
afford them a placid satisfaction tending to the 
same purpose. With this also is largely mingled 
that ever out-cropping Pharisaism which is their 
specialty and with them often produces all the 
serenity of genuine goodness.^ 

Heaven forbid, however, that we should impute 
this infirmity of our distant relatives as a deliber- 
ate transgression. They came honestly by it, and 
it would not be just to hold them accountable for 
a weakness which has descended from the remotest 
ages. In this regard their history reveals a long 
panorama of inherent frailty unequaled by any 
other nation. Whether this came from climate, 
soil, air, or supernal or infernal influence, it is im- 
possible to tell, but every century unfolds some 
new form of grotesque perversity. Hence when 
an English couple of to-day make their advent in 

1 " La vertue se croit assez belle par elle-meme pour se dispenser 
de faire des frais/' (La Cousine Bette.) 



SUNDAY AT PONTRESINA. 



119 



public so arrayed as to remind one of the king 
and queen of spades, they are really no more to 
be blamed therefor than he for his hereditary gout, 
or she for her original sin. It is simply one of 
the natural products of their island and a dispen- 
sation of Providence. In Julius Cassar's time the 
Britons dyed their naked bodies blue with woad 
and tattooed themselves. Boadicea wore a tunic 
of red, blue and yellow. The Anglo-Saxons also 
adorned themselves with bright colors of odious 
contrast, and the women tinged their hair blue 
and reddened their faces. " The rouge pot was 
as much a part of the Anglo-Saxon lady's toilet 
table as the crisping irons," though nature has 
rendered the former of these quite superfluous at 
the present day. We are told that at the jousts 
and tournaments held by Edward, the Black 
Prince, in the fourteenth century, the great de- 
sire was to appear in something new and astound- 
ing, and this led to the most fantastic fashions. 
Ladies of the first rank and greatest beauty might 
be seen on these occasions dressed in parti-colored 
tunics, half one color and half another, with hand- 
somely ornamented girdles of gold and silver in 
which were stuck short swords and daggers. In 
this masculine attire they appeared mounted on 
the finest horses they could procure, ornamented 
with the richest furniture. Parti-colored garments 
were in great favor. Men would wear one stock- 
ing of one color, the other of another." As for 
the men, their garb has ever been a favorite sub- 



120 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



ject for the satire of their own writers. Andrew 
Borde, in the Introduction to Knowledge," pub- 
lished during the reign of Henry the Eighth, pre- 
sents a figure, clad in the scantiest raiment it is 
possible to conceive, and holding up a pair of 
shears. Underneath are these lines : — 

" I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here, 
Musinge in my mynde, what rayment I shall were ; 
."For now I will were this, and now I will were that. 
Now I will were I cannot tell what.*' 

Philip Stubbs, who wrote in the days of Queen 
Elizabeth, asserts that " No people in the world is 
so curious in new fangles as they of England bee." 
Portia says of her Englishman, How oddly he is 
suited ! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, 
his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, 
and his behavior everywhere.'' 

But where proofs of this sort are so plentiful it 
is quite unnecessary to multiply them. 

On Sunday at Pontresina the Englishmen ap- 
peared with their customary clothing when on 
their travels, troubling themselves little in this re» 
spect about the sanctity of the day, or any feeling 
of abstract reverence for the occasion. Their gar- 
ments were mostly rough as to material and ec- 
centric in their mode, which was, to say the least, 
decidedly infected with worldliness. Their hats 
were of felt, hard and round, or soft and slouch- 
ily rakish. Knickerbockers were popular, and so 
were pea-jackets and loose tunics, belted round 
the waist, and giving the wearers a groomy air. 



SUNDAY AT PONTRESINA. 



121 



Trousers, coarse as gunny bags, at times of the 
homely shade termed pepper-and-salt, at times 
with checks or stripes as wide as a canal ; boots 
frequently of sail-cloth, with bands of skin, or 
made entirely of some thick leather, rough, red 
and rusty ; woolen shirts of innumerable patterns, 
none of them handsome, and ordinarily loud " 
as to their style, the collars turned down low and 
partly hidden by sandy whiskers, shaped like the 
island where they grew, and as ragged round the 
edges. Gloves conspicuous by their absence. The 
costume of the women was a heterogeneous med- 
ley, quite impossible to describe, but leaving on 
the eye the impression of a calamity, and void 
equally of taste, style or common sense. ^ 

1 The English cannot plead ignorance or forgetfulness, as an 
excuse for this supreme selfishness and utter disregard of the feel- 
ings of others in the matter of dress. They have been faithfully 
lectured from every quarter, and that by their own countrymen, 
though the praiseworthy efforts of the latter have failed to meet 
with the success they deserved. The Times has often tested its 
popularity in this way, raining hot shot upon the thick heads and 
impervious backs of its readers. Its Paris correspondent, allud- 
ing to the general British barbarism thus displayed abroad, and 
more particularly at the Exhibition of 1878, writes as follows con- 
cerning his compatriots then in the French capital : — 

"At this moment observation leads us to believe that among the 
myriads of holiday-making English in Paris, the few who wear 
* chimney-pot ' hats may easily be counted on the fingers. And 
most of them are business men of mature years, habitually ad- 
dicted to that particular wear, who have left their hat-brushes be- 
hind them. It follows necessarily that gloves are at a discount, so 
far, at least, as males are concerned, and we may be sure there 
has been no very sensible increase in the receipts of the firms of 
Houbigant or Jouvin. A well-cut frock coat is a phenomenon ; 



122 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



Regarding all this farrago of habiliments, one is 
reminded of a troop of buccaneers assembled to 

blacks or even Oxford mixtures seem to be held in general hor- 
ror ; and motley may be said to be the onlj wear. If you dress 
as you haye been used to dress yourself in Paris, you feel yourself 
depayse in the breakfast-room of your hotel. The fashion is all 
for rough tweed shooting clothes^ shirts of flaunting flannel^ hob- 
nailed boots^ and battered ' billycocks/ Then as to the ladies, it 
may be a satisfaction to husbands who haye been suffering with 
the times to mark the modest self-eclipse of their wiyes and daugh- 
ters ; but this ephemeral suppression of feminine yanity is a curi- 
ous puzzle to the social philosopher. Pretty faces are shadowed 
by the shabbiest of hats, with yveather-beaten feathers woefully 
out of curl. Graceful figures are distorted and disguised in 
stained and shrunken gowns of merino. And if these things are 
to be obseryed uniyersally under the green tree, what must be the 
case under the dry ? If the fair patronesses of the better hotels 
go worse dressed than their maids at ordinary seasons, we may 
conceiye that there is little else to be looked for in the ranks of the 
cheap excursionists : the fact being that the English nation seems 
with one consent to haye neglected all symbols of self-respect, and 
is paying a most questionable compliment to its Parisian enter- 
tainers. We know that the ill-requited ' hospitality ^ which the 
Parisians used to fling in our faces during their misfortunes in 
the war was a curious misnomer. If it was emulously extended, 
it was liberally paid for. Still, though we may go abroad with 
our purses in our hands and a credit in reserye on our bankers in 
England, there are social proprieties that ought to be attended to. 
If we went to a friend^s dinner in morning clothes, he would feel 
that he was insulted as well as his guests ; and if we tried to force 
the consigne at the Opera stalls in a shooting coat, we should find 
that the price of the ticket was forfeited. A gentleman or lady 
can be none the less bound to a decent obseryance of convention- 
alities in the absence of sensible social restraints or arbitrary un- 
written law ; and if the Parisians should take a fresh lease of 
false ideas about our boorishness, assuredly we shall only haye our 
representatiyes to blame. 

One need not yisit the Continent in order to obserye examples 
of this boorishness," since it is abundantly displayed on this side 



SUNDAY AT PONTRESINA. 



123 



extort a blessing on the morrow's raid, while their 
wives sit beside them, tricked out with the spoils 
of some altar. Lord, what a set of Guys ! " I 
heard a fellow-countryman mutter to himself, with 
a faint emphasis, as we were leaving the door. 
His remark struck me as bien tape, and the epi- 
thet recalled the changes of the past. Two cent- 
uries and a half since, or thereabouts, a " Guy " 

ol the ocean, and that every day. It is not confined to the mid- 
dle classes, but is distributed quite equally among all. In the best 
and most cultivated society of our large cities even English ladies 
who claim high standing at home, presuming on letters of intro- 
duction, may not unfrequently be seen at dinner parties and other 
entertainments given in their honor, dressed in fabrics of cotton 
or other cheap material, such as many servants would not care to 
use, and which do not always have the simple merits of neatness 
or cleanliness, while as to the male Briton on such an occasion, 
if he sports the snowy envelope peculiar to his sex, which in most 
civilized communities is considered essential to a gentleman, it is 
all that can be expected, as he does not display even that in every 
salon. The great majority of English women, whatever their rank, 
are more or less " Philistines " at heart, and have not changed 
since Milton embodied their idiosyncrasies in his Dalila : — 

" But \vho is this ? What thing of sea or land ? 
Female of sex it seems," etc., etc. 

Ruskin may well write that Turner ^' saw, and more clearly than 
he knew, the especial forte of England in vulgarity," and Mr. Mal- 
lock is amply supported by facts when he takes a similar view in 
The New Republic. "H we inquire, then, in what light we pre- 
sent ourselves to the other European nations, we shall find that, 
just as the Germans are known mainly as a profound nation, 
and the Erench as a prurient nation, so are we, in like manner, 
now known as a vulgar nation. And as this view of us exactly 
tallies with our own, it appears evident that the special national 
characteristic of the English is vulgarity/' 



124 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



signified a gentleman of good parentage and re- 
spectable connections, neatly and becomingly at- 
tired ; somewhat radical as to his religious and 
political opinions, but of exemplary piety and of 
mild and cheerful demeanor. Now it denotes a 
British Philistine saying his prayers. And thus 
the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." Of 
course we should not take too much note of dress 
in the house of worship. The attention is presumed 
to be fixed on matters of more serious import. 
But poor human nature is weak at the best, and a 
pink bonnet with scarlet poppies predominating 
oyer a green chuddah, and other similar incongrui- 
ties, male and female, of which our cousins haye 
the monopoly, must assuredly annoy some sensi- 
tive people born under a different regime and edu- 
cated under more liberal influences. It is quite 
probable that Madame Swetchine herself would 
have succumbed to such a distraction as this, even 
had a minor canon been preaching. In truth, it is 
all fearfully discordant, like an infant crying at its 
christening and tainting the gently modulated 
tones of clerical beneficence with the shrill wail of 
inherent depravity. And if out of keeping with 
the rude simplicity of a village church, it is^ still 
more repugnant to a handsome edifice, from the 
contrast between it and the worshipers. Does 
the English temperament detect an instinctive an- 
tipathy for elegant costume on the part of fine 
churches ? If not, why should the Paradise of 
architects be the Inferno of milhners and tailors ? 



SUNDAY AT PONTRESINA. 



125 



The contrary ought to be the fact, and it certainly 
would seem every way fitting that only the taste- 
ful and the appropriate should associate with the 
beauties and graces of architecture. 

The date of the completion of the church at 
Pontresina is concealed from this era. It will 
probably be finished only when some person comes 
forward who feels sufficient interest in the matter 
to take it in hand and give it the impulse of his 
private solicitation. A subscription, in order to 
achieve prompt success, should be personally con- 
ducted," hke an excursion, and not hung up to 
dry, like a Scripture text on the wall of a railway 
station. But for this form of sacrifice the English 
are not distinguished either at home or abroad. 
However charitable he may be to objects of spe- 
cial interest in his own country, John Bull does 
not yield to any excessive indulgence in that weak- 
ness on the Continent. This is quite manifest at 
the ordinary Sunday contributions, even when 
taken in behalf of the service which he is accus- 
tomed to attend. The offertory is pretty certain 
to disclose a preponderance of not very precious 
metal. The clergyman is often reminded of St. 
Paul's sorrowful and impressive words, wrung 
from him, doubtless, by the remembrance of sim- 
ilar circumstances, " Alexander the coppersmith 
did me much evil ; the Lord reward him accord- 
ing to his works." The nearer the frontier, the 
worse it is for the Church, as the plate is then 
made the recipient of all the debris remaining 



126 



GLEAXIXGS FROM POXTRESIXA. 



from the country just quitted : sous, pennies, kreu- 
zers, brass medals, tokens and various other odds 
and ends ; coins of disadvantage which some of the 
donors may have thought designed for the kingdom 
of heaven, as they do not circulate very freely else- 
where. This kind of benevolence requires a de- 
gree of cheek " unknown to the majority of peo- 
ple, as the English pass a plate that each may see 
his neio;hbor's laro;esse, and thus the sio;ht of one 
nimble sixpence may breed another, though the 
plan does not work well in most localities. The 
Roman Catholics, on the contrary, make use of a 
bag, that they may spare the feelings of domestics, 
poets, indigent widows, savants, professors, and 
those of limited means generally who cannot af- 
ford great sums, but yet wish to give their mite 
towards the support of a church which depends 
chiefly on the poor. This is politic, since its salva- 
tion has many a time and oft come from " Peter's 
pence." 

A few years since, the chaplain at a well-known 
watering-place was moved to pour forth his woes 
into the ever-open ears of the Times." His 
plaintive appeal will be found under date of Au- 
gust 18, 1871. I give it in full, thinking it may 
prove of interest to my readers, as well as a preg- 
nant illustration of my remarks : — 

" A HEAVY TAX. 

" Sir. — People in England requiring information as 
to places on the Continent are in the habit of addressing 



SUNDAY AT PONTRESINA. 127 



their letters to the British chaplain. I believe we are 
all willing enough to give what information we can, but 
it is very hard that we should be almost invariably taxed 
with the postage of our replies. Inquirers need not be 
afraid of inclosing English postage stamps ; they are 
always useful for the remittance of small sums. If it 
were only an occasional letter, the matter would not be 
worth mentioning, but when we are called upon to pay 
Is., 2s. or 3s. a week it is an unfair tax on our small 
salaries. 

" We cannot hold up our British tourists as remark- 
able for liberal contributions to our offertories, on which 
our stipends chiefly depend. Taking the last few Sun- 
days, I find that from congregations amounting in the 
aggregate to 2150 I have received 110 coins, in value 
from 1-1 2th to l-6th of a penny, 530 pence, 154 under 
threepence, 296 under sixpence, and 54 under a shilling; 
and many of these, too, the coins left from the last coun- 
try visited, — the United States, Germany, Holland, 
Switzerland or France, — and, of course, there is a con- 
siderable loss on the exchange. As we are answerable 
for all expenses attending divine worship, I think we 
may fairly ho^e for more consideration. 

" I am, sir, yours truly, 

"A British Chaplain." 

As no discussion followed this cry from the 
depths, and as there was no further reference to 
the subject, either pro or con, in the columns of 
the Times," it is fair to infer that the chaplain's 
statements were tacitly admitted to be too true 
for denial. 

One may form a pretty accurate estimate of the 



128 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



munificence of the support given by English trav- 
elers to their own religious institutions from the 
fact that the needs of every chapel on the Conti- 
nent would be satisfactorily supplied hj a donation 
of half a franc per week from each person in the 
habit of frequenting it, yet the collections do not 
equal this average by a considerable amount. I 
once heard this stated by a chaplain when making 
an appeal for the really modest douceur necessary 
to afford himself and his colleagues a respectable 
maintenance. His hearers said " Fancy ! " and 
returned to their hotels. The result was that the 
offerings grew smaller than ever, for the preacher's 
eloquence wrought so powerfully on those who had 
been accustomed to bestow one franc, that they 
forthwith diminished that sum by one half, being 
speedily and properly convicted of the folly of 
tempting others to continue in sin by assuming 
their obligations, when they had been rightly in- 
formed as to the extent of these. On the contrary, 
the stony hearts of those who had been in the 
habit of contributing nothing but coppers were 
scarcely affected at all, or if they were, their own- 
ers let concealment like a worm i' the bud feed " 
on their ''cheek," and the clergyman could only 
regret that he had not let matters rest as they 
were. And thus it frequently happens to the best 
laid plans. 

After the morning exercises the English me- 
chanically started for their rooms, where they 
mostly spent the remainder of the day, each ac- 



SUNDAY AT PONTRESINA. 



129 



cording to his taste. Many devoted themselves to 
their correspondence, vrhich was proper and canoni- 
cal, too, for the apostles did the same and St. Paul 
was wont to write Sunday letters, and long ones 
at that. Others read the peculiar epistles of the 
leaders of their own Church, Pusey, Colenso, Mau- 
rice, Stanley, Mackonochie and others, and the 
more they read, the less they knew what to be- 
lieve, which was but natural in these days when 
the Decalogue itself is a powder magazine, and 
even an innocent candle may suddenly expand into 
clouds of wrath and volumes of destructive and 
exasperating gas. 

Sunday evening at our hotel was a season of re- 
freshing to all who wished to partake thereof. 
The English-speaking guests assembled in the par- 
lor, which was well filled, and sometimes crowded. 
It contained a library of moderate size belonging 
to the Colonial Society, and under the care of the 
resident clergyman ; also a melodeon which was 
manipulated by a lady related to him by marriage, 
who had a taste for music and often said so. 
Sacred tunes were played, and we sang with such 
voices as nature had bestowed upon us, though 
most of us could hardly pride ourselves on the re- 
sult. Still we confided in the rectitude of our in- 
tentions and made a " joyful noise," for both of 
which there was excellent authority. Two curates 
of tender years bustled to and fro, announcing 
the hj^mns and organizing us to the best of their 
ability. They were bland to the gentlemen and 
6* 



180 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 

sweetlv courteous to the ladies. Docile little creat- 
ures with no secular taint, and of the most exqui- 
site deportment ; cherubs in black and white ; now 
softly purring, like a kitten, now bubbling over 
with suppressed animation, like a tea-kettle, they 
glowed with radiance, and their tranquil phosphor- 
escence was delightful to witness. And yet it was 
subdued to the yery quality of the place and of the 
occasion. A certain propriety was manifest even 
in their friskiness. They seemed young bishops 
sowing their wild oats. 

The style of the performer was desultory and 
impetuous. The musician was absorbed in her 
work, and a native independence carried her tri- 
umphantly through any little difficulties that 
might have presented themselves to a less ener- 
getic player. Her ideas were sentenced to instant 
execution without being allowed a moment for 
their own defense. She was not especially en- 
dowed with diffidence, and such tunes as appeared 
loath to quit their hiding places were pulled out 
by the roots. At a break or a false note from the 
instrument, she turned and sadly smiled, with an 
air partly of injury, partly of forgiveness, as if we 
were the offenders. The gentlemen were too in- 
tent on their hymn books to respond to this impu- 
tation. The ladies shot sidelong glances at each 
other, revealing various expressions, none compli- 
mentary. Perchance detecting these, when she 
reached the end she asked if something were not 
the matter with the apparatus. Eager to be civil, 



SUNDAY AT PONTRESINA. 



131 



some suggested the air, which of late they had 
observed was very bracing ; others, the rain ; some 
again, the glacier ; or it was quite possible that 
the Germans had worried it with their aesthetic 
complications. One soft voice intimated the 
cat," which illogical woman frequently brings for- 
ward as the source of mysterious difficulties for 
which she finds herself unable otherwise to ac- 
count. But each was careful to keep the truth in 
the background, being convinced that one should 
always be charitable, even if he has to strain a 
point for the purpose, and that deference to the 
clergy and their appurtenances is of the essence of 
worldly wisdom and of propriety no less. 

That the society gathered in the salon was 
chiefly English, most observers could see without 
particular inspiration. Apart from other evidence, 
their dress alone would have decided the question. 
The ladies were as " wild in their attire " as 
usual, each having replaced her bonnet by an 
adornment full as characteristic, though not so 
substantial as that. This was the D. V. QBea 
Volans more commonly known to irreverent 
contemners of the institution as the Dolly Varden, 
though its patrons disdain the name and refer to 
it among themselves by some secret term never 
divulged to the uninitiated. On our side of the 
water its origin is generally attributed to the 
genius of Dickens, but this is entirely ignored by 
his countrymen, with whom its advent appears as 
mysterious as that of a Quaker baby. Whatever 



1S2 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



or whenever may have been its inception, it has 
grown in popularity until it is hardly an exaggera- 
tion to say that the whole sex have it on the brain. 
Some allege that they are born with it as a kind 
of caul peculiar to insular development. It is not 
confined to any rank or condition. It is a crown 
of respectability within the grasp of the humblest 
matron, and yet royalty itself does not despise it. 
Perched on high, like a small hen trying to beguile 
the occupant from a large and unpromising egg, it 
caps the climax of womanly fascination and be- 
witches its patrons quite as much as their ad- 
mirers, who can imagine nothing to surpass its 
tastefulness and piquant effect. The phases it 
assumes are numerous. It is sometimes flowery, 
sometimes lacey, again it is ribbony, but each is a 
limited variety of the same species, and, let me 
add, to others than the English each specimen 
seems equally grotesque, ridiculous and unbecom- 
ing. If a woman be good-looking it makes her 
homely ; if she be homely it makes her ugly ; 
if she be ugly it gives her an air of indescriba- 
ble frightfulness. Still, where ignorance is bliss 
't is folly to be wise," and it would be both cruel 
and useless to wound the national content with 
this excrescence, which is so perfect that no lady 
who cared for her position would be seen without 
it, any more than Louis XIV. would have shown 
himself to the world without his wig, or the king 
of Ashantee minus his umbrella. 

While all these things were taking place, the 



SUXDAY AT POXTRESINA. 



133 



German guests — schismatics with an aversion to 
hymns — collected round the doors and looked in, 
evidently unsympathetic. Wishing to employ the 
melodeon according to their own fancies, they 
were ill-pleased that we had confiscated the par- 
lor^ even for one evening out of seven, and made 
no effort to hide their irritation. They made un- 
flattering remarks, occasionally sneered, and at 
length betook themselves to another room, not 
very distant, whence we could hear at intervals 
loud laughter and rude jeers. Ultimately they 
referred their case to the landlord, who had the 
good sense to side with the majority, in spite of 
his national sympathies, and declined to interfere. 
He not only paid due respect to the better-filled 
purses of the Anglo-Saxon element, but was pos- 
sessed of wit enough to understand that hymns, 
per se^ even though not remarkably well sung, 
lend a savor of superior worth to any hotel. So 
universally is this admitted, in fact, that no hotel- 
keeper, if he wish for success, dares to neglect 
even such a trifle as this. It costs httle or noth- 
ing, and can always be added to the bill indi- 
rectly. Though driven from the field, however, 
for the time, the Germans enforced their indem- 
nity the next day by invading the disputed terri- 
tory en masse, where they remained^ for several 
hours, while one of their number evolved an entire 
opera from his inner consciousness, — "piercing- 
notes, mad arabesques, inspired and unexpected 
fancies, which soften the soul of the most stub- 



134 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



born she," — to the great gratification of his hear- 
ers, who enjoyed it none the less that the other 
guests felt constrained to evacuate the building 
while the demonstration lasted. 

Thus ended our Sunday at Pontresina. 



CHAPTER IX. 



JOHK BULL AT LARGE. 

Exemplary as John Bull is allowed to be at 
his own fireside, at his church, at his club, where 
everj^thing moves on with the quiet method and 
order of Saturn in his rings, and where there is 
nothing to start his corruption, no sooner does he 
begin his travels than he bristles all over with 
pungent animosities, like an exasperated porcu- 
pine. It has been shrewdly remarked that we 
never see Englishmen in England. There they 
are obliged to behave themselves and to " dwell 
in decencies forever." They are the slaves of a 
thousand conventionalities, and are too much 
afraid of each other to leave for a moment the 
social ruts in which they are compelled to run. 
Once across the Channel and they make amends 
for their forced restraints by going to the other 
extreme. Their most odious manners and most 
disagreeable qualities are suddenly impelled to the 
surface and exhibited to all beholders with an 
energy that no one can ignore, however much in- 
clined. John Bull then becomes half Ishmaelite, 
half Pharisee, and testily resents in every nerve 
and muscle the very position in which he has 



136 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 

placed himself. If there is anj^ possible flaw to 
discover he is sure to find it. He growls if he is 
touched, and he growls if he is let alone. Nothing 
satisfies him, and should he be unable to detect 
any real grievance he will invent one for himself. 
Seated on the balcony of his hotel at Chamonix, 
he conscientiously follows the various phases of a 
sunset to the end, and only observes, Very fine, 
very fine ! but what a pity that Mont Blanc hides 
the view ! " And so he moves splenetically on, 
as Thackeray says, One of the dullest creatures 
under heaven, he goes trampling Europe under 
foot, shouldering his way into galleries and cathe- 
drals, and bustling into palaces with his buckram 
uniform." 

He is generally fractious ; when he speaks, he 
is critical and contradictory ; when he acts, he is 
angular and resentful ; when he is silent, it needs 
no very quick ear to detect the grindings of in- 
ternal friction. Even when asleep, he mutters to 
himself, and his swelling chin fluctuates with con- 
vulsive rumblings de prof undis and half-suppressed 
ejaculations, as he rehearses the various imposi- 
tions that have been practiced upon him, and even 
in his dreams composes a double-header for the 
"Times." He is in a state of chronic collision with 
the whole world. By his side sits the British 
mother, rubicund, severe, implacable ; dowered 
with an endless chain of proprieties, each link 
harder than the other ; stern, cold, non-committal. 
She sympathizes with her lord, and now and then 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE. 



137 



adds a little fuel to the flames. Mostly she listens, 
as he abuses the natives without stint, and on the 
subject of his own wrongs waxes profusely elo- 
quent. Nobody contradicts him, and he talks like 
verbosity in its cups, squandering his vernacular. 
At his hotel he contests every item of his bill, as 
if it were a boarding-pike leveled directly at him. 
The wine was vile, the bread not fit for a sepoy, 
the butter was bad, the beds abominable, the 
dishes nasty, and " Do you know, sir, there was 
actually no bath-tub in my room, and no soap, 
sir ! Do you hear that ? No soap, sir ! " He 
works himself into a fury, bombarding the land- 
lord from the omnibus-door, as he stands with 
bows and expostulations, bareheaded, and grace- 
fully waving his hand. Fortunately for the latter, 
he understands only one word out of a dozen, since 
foreign hotel-keepers, though often speaking Eng- 
lish with considerable facility, and making them- 
selves quite clear to their guests, do not by any 
means take the same pains to comprehend the 
answers addressed to them, whereby they profit in 
many ways. 

At length the torrent ceases to flow, not because 
the spring has dried up, but from fear lest the 
speaker may miss his train and thus feel obliged 
to return to the quarters he has just been abus- 
ing. 

The British tourist of our age is insular to the 
ends of his hair, and will so continue to the last, 
in all probability. However far he roams, his 



188 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



actual experience teaches him nothing that cannot 
be found between John o' Groat's House and 
Land's End. This leaks out through every pore. 
As a facetious American observed, ^' You strike isle 
wherever you touch him." He is, in truth, only 
Dr. Johnson in a new sphere, with the same big- 
otry, the same ignorance and narrow-mindedness, 
though spread over a wider surface and worn into 
more numerous " anfractuosities." One is tempt- 
ed to see if any of that great moralist's suits, 
which his admiring posteritj^ have so plentifully 
provided, will fit his present representative.^ 

1 Dr. Johnson was not only a representative Englishman hut he 
had a shrewd and correct idea of the general status of his fellow- 
countrymen, both mental and corporeal. During the sage's tour 
in Scotland he had a long conversation with Lord ^NLonboddo. In 
a letter to Mrs. Thrale he says : T7e agreed pretty well, only we 
disputed in adjusting the claim of merit between a shop-keeper of 
London and a savage of the American wildernesses. Our opin- 
ions were, I think, maintained on both sides without full convic- 
tion. Monboddo declared boldly for the savage, and I, perhaps 
for that reason, sided with the citizen.'" 

An acute perception of this latent savagery was very likely the 
motive of Voltaire's famous couplet, written during his exile in 
England : — 

" Fier et bizarre Anglais, qui des memes couteaux 
Coupez la tete aux rois et la queue aus chevaux," 

Capricious, proud, the same axe avails 

To chop off monarchs" heads, or horses' tails. 

If the statement be true which appears in the chronicle of Gnil- 
laume de Xangis, who lived in the thirteenth century (the same, 
or a similar story is credited by Goldsmith, in his Letters from a 
Citizen of the World, to " Simon Mayole,'^ whom he declares, with 
his usual accuracy, to have flourished not more than a hundred 
years ago that in his day there existed in Dorsetshire a race 
having tails like sheep, — "caudas sicut pecudes/' — the custom of 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE. 



139 



* John Bull on his travels, John Bull in the full 
panoply of his antagonism and advancing to meet 
the enemy, is better known to the world than any 
other character that we encounter abroad. Every- 
thing about him is familiar ; his grotesque and 
incongruous garb, which seems the natural out- 
growth of his peculiar and discordant tempera- 
ment ; his pink, orbicular, good-dinner face, with 
its chevaux-de-frise of repellent whiskers ; his air 
of independent egotism and perfect contempt for 
the tastes or preferences of others ; his pride of 
place ; his Pharisaism and obtuseness ; his disdain 
of foreigners and his toughness of obstinacy ; his 
offensive reserve and crusty taciturnity ; his insular 
and suspicious prejudices ; his pompous threats of 
writing to the Times ; " his fastidious weakness 
for tea and for early friction ; his squeamish horror 
of dirt and smells : his insatiate appetite for water 
and bath-tubs, for huge pitchers and basins, and 
his fearful clamor if these are not forthcoming ; 
his superstitious apprehension of Judas-holes," 
and his incessant fear of some new imposition, 
which causes him to become a burden to himself 

decaudation mentioned by Yoltaire may be properly supposed to 
have once been much more widely extended even than in his day, 
and by no means limited to the quadruped in question. Keason- 
ing a posteriori, one might justifiably infer that here is a prolific 
fact for Darwin, illustrating the theory of natural selection and 
the descent of our race, and tending to show that the great scient- 
ist had wandered farther than was necessary in search of facts 
which might have been discovered at his own door. The "shop- 
keeper of London " may prove to be " the missing link " after all 
and thus vindicate Monboddo's firm belief in the ''homo caudatus" 



140 GLEA^^INGS FROM POXTRESINA. 



and a torment to everybody else — all these make 
John Bull as familiar to the continental traveler 
as the earliest impressions of his childhood. 

This isolated reserve and self-satisfaction have 
been widely diffused among all classes of the Eng- 
lish from time immemorial. They are as charac- 
teristic as their dress and, however unattractive 
to those who encounter them, form an interesting 
study to the ethnologist. The examples that are 
continually cropping out in their literature, like 
fossil shells on a hill-top which suddenly reveal a 
long-buried past, are often very amusing. In 1812 
Mistress Hannah More, that prim Aspasia, writes 
from London, ''It is a terrible fetter upon the 
liberty of free-born English conversation to have 
so many foreigners as this town now abounds with, 
imposing their language upon us." ^ 

In ''A Sermon Preach 'd before the Right Hon- 
ourable the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, at the 
Cathedral-Church of St. Paul, London, July 26, 
1T13, On Occasion of the much-lamented Death 
of the Eight Honourable and Right Reverend 
Henry, late Lord Bishop of London. By Thomas 
Gooch, D. D., Fellow of Groiivih and Cams Col- 
lege in Camhridge^ and lately one of his Lordship's 
Domestick Chaplains," we read : " He spent some 
Years in Traveling ; not to suck in the Maxims 
of Foreign States, or to try the Vices of Foreign 
Courts ; Not before He knew our own Constitu- 
tion in Church and State^ was able to defend it, 

1 Memoirs of Mrs, Hannah More. Bj William Koberts, Esq. 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE. 



141 



and sure to stick to it. He observ'd and examin'd 
the Civil and Ecclesiastical Politics Abroad ; He 
made them his Study, but not his Rule. The 
more He stayed m France and Italy etc., the 
more English-Man He was. He came Home the 
better States-Man and the better Qhurch-Man. 
He was Proof against all their Arts, to debauch 
either his Principles or his Practices. He saw 
their Manners, but did not imitate them." 

These are but two instances among many that 
might be quoted were there room therefor, but 
they are sufficiently characteristic and original to 
serve my purpose without the need of any farther 
illustrations. It may be of interest to add that 
the patriotic bishop in question was Henry Comp- 
ton, who enjoys a fragrant immortality, an odor of 
sanctity, as it were, to this day, as his name is 
borne by that popular plant, the sweet fern, which 
is known to botanists as Comptonia.^ 

And yet in spite of every discomfort, John Bull 
does like to travel, if onlj from sheer pertinacity 
of opposition. When Napoleon said that the Eng- 
lish abandoned their country as soon as they could, 
the pungency of the remark was nearly equaled 
by its truth.2 They have a natural liking for 

1 "Fulham Palace, the residence of the Bishops of London, is 
one of those estates which have a special charm for the plant 
lover. Bishop Compton, a great enthusiast in tree culture, en- 
riched his domain with many rare trees which have now [1879] 
grown into their prime and in some cases have passed it/* (The 
Gardener's Chronicle.) 

^ La France n'a rien a envier a TAngleterre, a un pays que 



142 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



obstacles and will deny themselves every gratifi- 
cation rather than give them up. So they roam 
about, like the saints of the Middle Ages, in search 
of a martyrdom which refuses to go to them, and 
doubtless think that in the end it will be imputed 
to them for righteousness, agreeing, perchance, 
with Milton, when he says : I cannot praise a 
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and un- 
breathed, that never sallies out and sees her ad- 
versary." In this way that large share of heredi- 
tary pugnacity which they always hold in reserve 
is kept in a state of healthy development, while 
copious exercise prevents any abatement of their 
native pluck. "What a charming day! Let us 
go and kill something,*' is the tribute of French 
wit to their national propensities. What they 
kill matters little, " niggers " serving quite as 
well for this purpose as pheasants. From their 
youth up it has ever been an instinct with them 
to fight something or somebody, and thus ever 
keep their extremities in good condition, especially 
their aggressive fists. These two galvanic bat- 
teries which nature placed at the end of their arms 
were evidently designed for use. Thus they de- 
velop their corporal faculties into a good physique, 
and they feel it to be a duty to impress this 
redundant muscle on the world and test their 
vigor by practice. In the absence of other oppor- 

ses habitants desertent des quails le peuvent ; il y en a en ce mo- 
ment plus de quarante mille sur le continent." (Napoleon au 
Conseil d'Etat.) 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE. 



143 



tunity, they are quite ready to pound each other, 
and even the ladies on occasion gladly display 
their manliness in this way, and that with a pluck 
worthy of Boadicea herself. Says Hawthorne, 
" All Enghsh people, I imagine, are influenced in 
a far greater degree than ourselves by this simple 
and honest tendency, in cases of disagreement, to 
batter one another's persons, and whoever has seen 
a crowd of English ladies (for instance at the door 
of the Sistine Chapel in Holy Week) will be sat- 
isfied that their belligerent propensities are kept 
in abeyance only by a merciless rigor on the part 
of society." Had Hawthorne ever witnessed the 
frantic and pertinacious struggles of the dowagers 
and their protegees to effect an entrance into the 
presence of Majesty when holding a drawing-room 
at the palace of St. James, he might have enlivened 
his narrative with another pertinent example. 

This taste for antagonism extends to the food of 
the English. Even between their teeth they like 
to feel materiel that will both develop their strength 
and give them a sense of good substantial con- 
trariety. They must ever be crushing something. 
Thomas Clarke in his ''Defence of Henry A^HI.," 
published A. D. 1546, says it was a proverb in his 
day, " Geve the Englishman boeffe and mustarde." ^ 

1 " Gruinio, What say you to a piece of beef and mustard? 
Katharina. A dish that I do love to feed upon/' 

(The Taming of the Shrew.) 

It is curious to notice that the writers of some centuries ago agree 
in attributing the tinge of sadness and depression displayed by 



144 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



Stow in his Survey " informs us that in the house 
of the great Earl of Warwick, ^'the king-maker," 
as he was called, there was oftentimes six Oxen 
eaten at a Breakfast ; and every Tavern was full 
of his Meat. For he that had any acquaintance 
in that House, might have there so much of sodden 
and rost Meat, as he could prick and carry upon 
a long Dagger," — a characteristic union, which is 
also intimated by the Constable of France before 
the battle of Agincourt, when he says of the invad- 
ers, Just, just ; and the men do sympathize with 
the mastiffs in robustious and rough coming on, 
leaving their wits with their wives : and then give 
them great meals of heef and iron and steely they 
will eat like wolves and fight like devils." One 
detects similar predilections in the national choice 
of a patron saint. If he had been made to order, 
George of Cappadocia could not more completely 
have filled out the popular ideal. He was not 
merely a bishop, but a soldier, and not only that 
but a contractor who had become rich by sup- 
plying the army at Constantinople with pork.^ 

the English to their love of beef. Du Guez in his Introductorie 
observes, Touchjng the hefe : I do estymate him of nature mel- 
ancolyke and engendre and produce grosse blode well norisshyng 
folkes robustes and of strong complexion, whiche occupy them in 
great busynesse and payne." In the Noble lyfe Sr natures of man. 
Of bestes, etc., by Lawrens Andrewe, one reads, " Isaac sayth that 
an oxce flessh is the dryest flesshe amonge all other & it maketh 
euyll hu??20ures, & bredeth mela?2coly & they melancolicus that eat 
suche metes be like lo suffer many diseases.'' 

^ Cappadox quoddam monstruum, ex ultimis terrjs nostrse 
finibus oriundum, malum genere, animo peius, .... tandem cum 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE. 



145 



No wonder the cry of the famished English at 
Agincourt was Harry, England and St. George ! " 
Their viands are still heavy and cohesive and seem 
the natural accessories of the leaden, dingy, solid, 
foggy, monotonous comfort in which they are born 
and reared. They have no cooking that deserves 
the name. Every meal resembles one of their own 
Sundays, boiled or roasted without seasoning. Yet 
" this solidity and compound mass " well suits the 
national mood and their appetites are never un- 
equal to the emergency. The true inwardness of 
every Briton is his stomach. They are 

" all as hungry as the sea 
And can digest as much/' ^ 

ad Rempublicam gerendam pestifere se contulisset, atque extremo 
et sordidissimo illius muneri, hoc est suillis carnibus quibus turba 
militaris alitur suscipiendis, preefectus fuisset. (St. Gregorius 
Nazianzenus, In Laudem Athanasii Archiepiscopi Alexandrini 
Oratio.) 

1 When the Duke Orsino compared his love for Olivia to the 
English stomach in its best estate, he employed a simile of peculiar 
aptness, and none the less so that in Shakespeare's age this organ 
would appear to have been considered the seat of emotions more 
refined and more bewitching than any which are now supposed 
to animate it. The all-knowing gran maestro in putting this 
image into the Duke's mouth was fully justified, not merely by 
his own observation, but by the general belief. Says Bacon, Nor 
must it be forgotten, as bearing on the government of the affec- 
tions, that especial care is to be paid to the mouth of the stomach, 
chiefly to prevent it from being too much relaxed. For this part 
has more power over the affections than either the heart or the 
brain.'' George Cavendish in his Life of Cardinal Wolsey, speak- 
ing of Mistress Anne Boleyn, when maid of honor to Catherine, 
queen of Henry YIII., observes, " Howbeit, after she knew the 
king's pleasure; and the great love that he bore her in the boU 
7 



146 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



When they have finished their meal they leave the 
table — and nothing else.^ 

Of course, for the well flavored and buoj^ant 
dishes of a foreign table d'hote John Bull has only 
contempt and a loudly expressed aversion. He 
quits the salle-a-m anger with an enlarged spleen, 
an aching void, and an internal tumult such as 
those other islanders must have felt with whom 
Captain Cook disagreed so lamentably. 

The ancestral namesakes of the English, the 
Angli, in our tongue called Angles — a most ap- 
posite name — took such peculiar care of their di- 
gestion as to pass laws for the especial protection 
of the stomach.^ This fact may partly account for 
the present thriving condition of the English in 
this respect, no less than for the interest which so 
conservative a people would be likely to show for 
the stomach as an hereditary institution, a nation- 
al heir-loom, so to speak, which pride of lineage 
would ever impel them to keep in its normal state 

torn of his stomach, then she began to look verv hault and stout, 
having all manner of jewels, or rich apparel, that might be gotten 
with money/' 

1 The artist Bewick writes from Rome to his wife, "We have 
wild boars' flesh, which is delightful, and cock's combs ; and they 
make me every day five or six different dishes to dinner, al- 
though one of them would be enough. But I sometimes make a 
clean board.'' 

2 " XII. Si contra stomachum vulnus factum erit, et claudi non 
potuerit, xii. sol. pro ipse apertione componat. XIII. Si ipse 
stomachus perforatus fuerit, uec vulnus medicamento claudi po- 
tueritj pro vulneris apertione totidem sol. componat, quot pro ipso 
Tulnere composuit." (Frederic Lindembrog, Codex Legum An- 
tiquarum.) 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE. 



147 



of eflBcient operation. Hence the sj^mpathy felt 
by every true Briton at the suggestion of a vacuum 
in that part of the system. When Dr. Johnson 
signed his note "Impransus," he sounded the very 
depths of pathos from his fellow-countrymen's point 
of view. The woes of Lear were nothing to this 
cry from the depths. And so Macaulay, wishing 
to impress on his readers the cruelty of Frederic 
the Great towards his luckless cabinet secretaries, 
caps the climax of their sorrows by stating that 

they never knew what is was to dine." 

With such an excess of inherent activity and 
doggedness, as might have been inferred, the Eng- 
lish take kindly to climbing, and thus can do some- 
thing towards working it off. They always pre- 
fer some enterprise that hath a stomach in 't." 
Striding over miles of champaign, they make their 
way through lonely valleys, and up the face of 
crags so steep as to afford no footing even to the 
chamois and so lofty that the broad-winged 1am- 
mergeyer seldom ventures to scale their crests. 
Having finally attained the summit he sought, the 
climber surveys the vast earth with serene satisfac- 
tion. He is being hurled round its centre with 
fearful velocity, as if in a sling 12,000 miles long, 
and yet he clings to the giddy peak with such a 
gripe that nothing can dislodge him. He is "glad 
to the brink of fear ; " and then there is the descent 
yet to be made, still more difficult and dangerous. 
Is it strange that the whole exploit appears filled, 
crammed, with delights ? 

As the typical Briton is not possessed of the 



148 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



faintest tinge of that genial bonhommie which so 
often smooths the path of other travelers, so he 
is no less unfortunate in the want of any sense of 
the ridiculous, or of any sympathy for wit or humor. 
These are entirely absent ; nor do his mental fac- 
ulties secrete anything which in the least degree 
resembles them. He can no more see the point of 
a witticism, a pleasantry, or quaint conceit, than 
he can detect the difference between light bread 
and heavy, or between good and bad coffee. To 
him it is as blunt as a leaden foil, and can be forced 
into his pia mater only by the process of trepan- 
ning. It is as when one lights an irresponsive fire- 
work, designed to illuminate the whole neighbor- 
hood, and produces nothing but turbid darkness. 
To use a Shakespearian word, of which constant 
experience must have taught the poet the fitness, 
he is beef-witted." ^ Hence his woes on the 
Continent are never alleviated by any of that hu- 
morous drollery in which the otherwise miserable 
so frequently take refuge as a solace. Platitudes 
are his forte. Should a sportive sally be lavished 
upon him, a long explanation thereof inevitably 
follows, and before the end is reached the flavor 
has all evaporated, like ottar of roses poured on a 
tombstone. They are obtuse Angles. Emerson 
observes, with kindly appreciation : A saving stu- 
pidity masks and protects their perception, as the 
curtain of the eagle's eye." This may be regarded 

1 " I am a great eater of beef and I believe that does harm to 
my wit/' (Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Twelfth Night; or, What 
you Will.) 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE, 



149 



as a sort of deferential stab, courteous though 
mortal. One could hardly be assassinated with 
greater or more considerate politeness. It is the 
nature of John Bull, and he cannot help it, to look 
with suspicion and distaste on anything that re- 
sembles a joke, or other facetiousness. He shrinks 
from it, as from a stranger with no letter of intro- 
duction, looking askant diagonally, and beating an 
instinctive retreat into his thick skull, like a snail 
abruptly tickled. Should you desire to hold a 
place in English society, be a gilded Turveydrop, 
and take care not to open your mouth to any ut- 
terance but vague commonplaces. Nothing passes 
current but conversational inanities and fossil facts 
well polished into inexpressive smoothness. Be- 
ware of saying anj^thing original. Your hearer 
will think you are trying to impose on him, and 
to obtain valuable consideration by false pretenses. 
He never attempts to entertain any one himself, 
and naturally distrusts any one who essays to en- 
tertain him. Should he, in a very rare instance, 
happen to feel impelled by courtesy to assume a 
sympathetic smile, the effect is as painful to witness 
as a spasm of toothache, and suggests ancient and 
rusty machinery suddenly forced into unwonted 
motion. He will not repeat it, however, but will 
give vent to his outraged feelings rather than re- 
new the sacrifice, as did the London alderman to 
Sydney Smith when the latter had twice extracted 
an unwilling laugh, and thus dulled the flavor of 
the green turtle soup which civic majesty was pat- 
ronizing. 



150 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



If you must seek to be amusing, you may do so 
occasionally and come off victorious, provided you 
know your man. In such a case do not stick at a 
trifle, if you wish to win. Let your story be a 

whopper," and you will see the wisdom of Bacon 
when he wrote, " A mixture of a lie doth ever add 
pleasure." On a train in Germany for several 
hours with an English family, I observed, apropos 
of some topic we had been discussing, that I had 
seen in the Egyptian Museum at Florence the 
chariot in which Jehu was driving when he said, 
" Come and see my zeal for the Lord," also the 
very whip with which he imparted his zeal to his 
horses, both which valuable relics had been lately 
found in a tomb in Palestine. They listened with 
every sign of the liveliest interest, and both mother 
and daughter said Fancy ! " as if they really en- 
joyed it. But when, later in the day, I sought to 
follow up my success by informing them that in 
the Middle Ages the chief dignitaries of the church 
were wont to dance on Christmas and at Easter 
with the nuns in the cloisters, and with such 
frenzy of enjoyment that in the very town of Er- 
furt, which we were then passing, a bishop on one 
occasion actually died of apoplexy as the result 
thereof, they at once became extremely frigid. 
John Bull turned quite red, eyed me suspiciously 
and made no reply. The ladies exchanged mean- 
ing looks and then admired the scenery. I per- 
ceived that I had lost caste, and yet the first nar- 
rative was dubious, to say the least, while the sec- 
ond was historically true. Probably they were all 



JOHN BULL AT LARGE. 



151 



thinking of the Bishop of London cutting a fling 
with Miss Nightingale, and the talk it would make, 
and their skepticism might, after all, only be re- 
garded as quite pardonable. 

The English are very good subjects on which to 
experiment and watch the result of sundry invest- 
ments, for, though often suspicious, they are never 
so in the right place or at the right time. They 
never comprehend the real drift of a speculation 
of this sort, though there is this profit from their 
obtuseness, that they are spared the pangs which 
might otherwise be inflicted by the caustic wit 
which is frequently launched at them. As it is, 
a barb of this sort glances from them like water 
from the dome of St. Paul's. An American and 
an Englishman were disputing about the probity 
and commercial integrity of their respective coun- 
tries. The latter observed, " Your banks are 
always breaking," to which the former replied, 
" Well, nothing ever breaks in your country, 
surely ; not even the day." This sarcasm seemed 
to me entirely lost on John Bull, nor could I see 
that he had the faintest idea of its purport. No 
more did the Bishop of London, in all probability, 
understand the Shah of Persia, when to the for- 
mer's reproaches of that magnate for worshiping 
the sun the latter answered apologetically, " Per- 
haps you would be more tolerant, if you had ever 
seen him." Carlyle evidently wrote from a wide 
experience when he exclaimed, and that without 
Emersonian velvet, " In this world there is but 
one appalling creature — the stupid man." 



CHAPTER X. 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 

Of the numerous attractions that render Pontre- 
sina and its vicinity so charming, there are none 
which surpass the flowers. These are a perennial 
and inexhaustible delight to its visitors and few 
can resist the fascination of their beaut}^, their 
multitude and that infinite variety of hue which 
the impetuous summer and the inspiration of the 
lavish sunshine quicken into sudden brilliancy. 
They make a floral paradise of the entire valley 
and everj^where win a willing tribute from the 
eye. The meadows they punctuate with graphic 
points of light. On the lower slopes they near- 
ly conceal the grass. Higher up, in the haunts 
of the rocks, they burst into dazzling sheets of 
bloom, and form amid the saturated gravel oases 
of marvelous luxuriance. A single plant with 
roots of subtle fineness, far-reaching as if grop- 
ino: for hid treasure, will brincr forth thousands 
of blossoms so densely flush with affluence of color 
that not a leaf or a stalk is visible. These are the 
more striking from the fact that they are not, as 
in the low lands,* toned down by the ample verd- 
ure around them, but stand out in effective con- 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 153 



trast with the stones, the ice, the snow and the 
rippHng streams in all their fragrant variety and 
wealth of vivid expression. Springing profusely 
at the very edge of the glacier, they hang un- 
chilled and without a shudder over its deepest cre- 
vasses, snatching, as it were from the very jaws of 
death, a farther and more abounding grace. The 
abrupt and serrated peaks of the Bernina group 
that overlook the Engadine are composed chiefly 
of granite, and nowhere else on the earth's surface 
does this rock offer scenery so bold. Perchance 
in its innermost recesses, its ruddy heart of hearts, 
it still preserves some latent heat from its old 
molten ardor ; perchance it has peculiar power to 
retain and radiate the warm fervor of the sun's 
rays ; perhaps its elements are quick to infuse fresh 
vigor into vegetable life ; but from whatever cause, 
this primeval stone, stern and barren as it appears, 
is a nursing mother of flowers and wherever it pre- 
dominates there does it bestow upon them, not 
only a prolific growth, but a depth of glowing tint 
that is never equaled elsewhere. It is thus possi- 
ble that the sympathy of its secret fires may be 
the source of that light which comes from the yel- 
low poppy and the flame-colored anemone so well 
known among the Rsetian Alps.^ 

1 I know not if it be in the power of science to demonstrate 
some mysterious relation between the soil of certain countries and 
the floral progeny thereof, but in California, the land of gold, the 
prevalence of yellow flowers has been noticed. The first welcome 
extended to the emigrants when crossing the plains in the early 
summer is from boundless acres covered with the golden blooms of 
7* 



154 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



To those gifted with a taste for botany, or even 
with the simple love of flowers, the Engacline offers 
pleasurable resources without limit and visitors 
susceptible in this matter daily see a new world 
outspread before them. This is especially appre- 
ciated by the English ladies, who form the major- 
ity of sojourners in the valley, as they bring from 
their homes a refined and healthy devotion to their 
own gardens, which they have inherited both from 
a remote ancestry and from the growing culture of 
the last few generations. In this pursuit the Eng- 
lish excel every other people, and among no other 
nation than theirs has it been proved or developed 
with one half their expenditure of love, money, 
time, labor or self-denial. It is a wholesome, reviv- 
ing and sensible predilection and every way im- 
proving to mind as well as body.^ Even in Anglo- 
Saxon times the national partiality for flowers was 
conspicuous and the constant allusions thereto in 
works of that period show its descent from the old- 
est and purest stock. It grew with the growth 
and strengthened with the strength of the people, 
till England herself became a ^' sea-walled gar- 
den." 

In such a refreshment — " the greatest refresh- 
ment to the spirits of man " — as Bacon terms 

the Eschscholtzia, or California Poppy, the Bartonia, the Shortia, 
the Fremontia and other plants, glowing ^vith every shade of that 
color. 

1 " A man who loves his garden and works in it is sure to be a 
less dull, and therefore a better, man than other men who have no 
such pursuit/' (Realmah.) 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 155 



it, Chaucer's worthy knight " took an especial 
pride : — 

" He had a gardin walled all with ston, 
So fayre a gardin wote I no wher non." 

Even Sir Isaac Newton, impervious as he was to 
all other external influences, was " very curious in 
his garden, which was never out of order, not en- 
during to see a weed in it." 

What Sir Thomas Overburj^ wrote of his ''faire 
and happy milkmayd" was true in his day, and is 
now, of many English women of good estate and 
position : The garden and beehive are all her 
physick and chyrurgery and she lives the longer 
for'^'t." 1 

From this may be inferred how natural and 
deeply seated is the interest which English ladies in 
foreign lands both feel and express for every plant 
that springs and flower that blows. This extends 
even to arduous, it may be perilous, expeditions in 
search of some rare and fascinating blossom ; to a 
study and analysis of its inner life, with broad and 

1 "Humboldt in his Cosmos has dwelt on the taste for the 
beauties of nature which has prevailed among various peoples and 
at different periods of the world's history, but he appears to 
me to have by no means appreciated or done justice to the force 
of this sentiment among our forefathers in the Middle Ages, and, 
perhaps, I may say, especially in England/' (Wright's Histoiy 
of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the 
Middle Ages.) This characteristic was quite conspicuous among 
the Pilgrim Fathers, who experienced a solemn gladness in trans- 
porting to this country, from both the garden and the field, many 
flowers on which their eyes had been wont to rest when in their 
English homes. 



156 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



curious sympathy ; to sketching, painting, press- 
ing it, and even to entering the whole scientific 
description thereof in their journals, or herbaria, 
with appropriate quotations from Shelley or from 
Wordsworth underneath, — ''tcmfus amor florumy 
Often they uncork and swallow without a question 
the unpalatable and fearfully-composed epithet 
which science has in many cases prescribed for it. 
One can easily imagine how large an element of 
vivacity was added to our hotel parlor of an even- 
ing. Then the ladies gathered round the tables 
and displayed the acquisitions of the day, while 
the tongues of the gentle creatures clicked with 
responsive eloquence as they compared notes and 
exchanged specimens. Huge words in a language 
vulgarly described as dead, but which every now 
and then asserts its vitality in a most marvelous 
way, were tossed about like chunks of wisdom 
from the lips of Tupper. 

" Mrs. Wooffindale, did you know that this was 
a Grlohularia nudicaidis ? 

" Fanc}^ ! What a chawming thing for a vaws I " 

" My dear Miss Chuttles, where do you think I 
found this specimen of Papaver Pyrenaica ? " 
Where, to be sure ? " 

" Why, on the top of the Piz Languard. We 
started at four this morning." 
Fancy ! " 

Lady Larapoogle, where did you get that 
lovely little gem ? Why, I declare, it 's an Andro- 
sace helvetica ! " 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE, 157 



" Miss Buskin found it. She lias been over the 
Diavolezza." 

In all this rain ? " 

No ; it snowed where she was." 

" Was n't she wet ? " 

" Yes ; but she was too cold to feel it." 

^' Did n't she get awfully tired ? " 

" I dare say she would have been, but she fell 
into a crevasse and the excitement of climbing out 
prevented it." 

Fancy ! I hope she will be here this evening, 
for I am thinking of going to the Diavolezza my- 
self to-morrow." 

Enter Miss Buskin, ruddy and radiant, her 
hands full of flowers. Grand chorus, Where did 
you get that exquisite Ranunculus glacialis ? " 

And then the intricate and innumerable details 
that sprung up and went buzzing around like 
bees ! " How do you press your flowers so as 
to keep the colors so perfectly. Miss Tudwax ? " 
" How long, and under how many weights ? " 

What sort of paper do you use, and where do 
you get it ? " " What is the price ? " Where 
is it the cheapest ? " What do you call it in 
German?" ''Does the color make any differ- 
ence ? " " Had I better buy a pale red or a 
slate ? " And so on ad infinitum^ while the hours 
flew rapidly by, shaking learning and entertain- 
ment from their wings, with " nods, and becks, 
and wreathed smiles." There were some, how- 
ever, who resorted for their specimens to the house 



158 GLEAXIXGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



of a former village schoolmaster, who had discov- 
ered it to be more profitable, and more agreeable 
as well, to gather flowers to sell, than to try to 
infuse erudition into the heads of unpromising ur- 
chins, fifty in a lump, at five hundred francs per 
annum. He pressed his collections, packed them 
in small wooden boxes, neatly painted to imitate 
a book, each on a sheet of nice white paper with 
its name and all necessary particulars. These 
formed a most agreeable souvenir and the inventor 
thereof made it pay well. But there were few of 
the English ladies who patronized him, and these 
were looked upon with latent disdain by the oth- 
ers, who gave up their whole minds to the pursuit 
and were true to their principles.^ 

For botanical researches the women of England 
are mostly furnished with various facilities which 
their sex elsewhere do not enjoy. They have a 
rugged physique, an energetic temperament and 

1 Some of the English ladies derived peculiar enjoyment from 
sending home bjpost to benighted friends less favored than them- 
selves boxes of such Alpine plants as they thought would fail to 
detect the difference between the bracing breezes of Pontresina 
and the sooty exhalations of Peckham and Wormwood Scrubs. 
For this venture the prime favorite seemed to be the Pinguicula, 
a sly, treacherous, plausible, carnivorous little herb, unctuously 
glistening, the Oily Gammon of plants, with hairs cropping out 
here and there and sticky all over its surface with a seductive, 
tenacious secretion which serves as a gastric juice. By this the 
plant lives and thrives, bein,2", as it were, merely a stomach turned 
inside out, insatiate, remorseless, having no roots, or nearly none, 
but greedily abstracting such sustenance as it can from the pure 
and innocent air and the bodies of the insects it can beguile into 
its maw by the display of its insidious though pretty flowers. 



BO TAX Y IN THE EXGADIXE. 



159 



constitutions as durable as that of Britannia her- 
self, joined to a liealtliy taste for open-air life 
and a quick sympathy with every mood and work 
of nature, so that the very soul keeps its youth ; 
athletic limbs, well-developed extremities, and a 
manly stride ; nothing gelatinous, pulpy, or pli- 
able about them ; feet unconscious of fatigue and 
able to move with nimble celerity over this tread- 
mill globe, giving it an energetic push with hap- 
py abandon as it spins away from under them ; 
feet that would make their mark anywhere, and 
often leave a permanent impress, so that coming 
upon them in lonely places one feels a certain 
dread and flies, fearful of encountering the por- 
tentous proprietors of such dread foundations." 
To these movables add hands that might easily 
pull up a tree by the roots, and occasionally do 
so ; ^ a complexion that despises a veil, and cares 
not for snow, hail, rain, or any other harshness of 
the elements, and which nothing would spoil, in 
fact, unless there were a shower of sulphuric acid ; 
short skirts, of coarse material, fit for all weathers, 
and void of trailing drawbacks, often of red flan- 

1 During my stay at Pontresina an English lady was arrested, 
haled before a magistrate and fined for tearing up a young Cem- 
bra for her herbarium. She was taken red-handed in the very act, 
as the tree was found on her person. This stalwart and well-de- 
veloped physique of the English women has long endeared them to 
their national writers. " The mighty mother " of his country is 
sung by Pope with ardent appreciation in his most spirited num- 
bers, while in the works of Thomas Randolph, a protege' of Ben 
Jonson and a poet and scholar of no ordinary talent, one reads an 
ode " To his well Timbred Mistriss. " 



160 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



nel, anti-rlieumatic and picturesque, " lending en- 
chantment to the view/' the farther off the better; 
rough dogskin gloves, boots of goodly size, vrith 
soles as hard as a Geek verb ; frowzy hair and a 
hat which no pen has yet been competent to de- 
scribe, and she stands before you in her habit as 
she lives.i A robustious, nerveless, utilitarian cre- 
ation from head to foot ; an irrepressible fact ; not 
easily thwarted by any obstacle and whom no one 
would be likely to molest ; afraid of no height, 
solitude, wild animal or other peril, and able to 
hunt even the edelweiss in its most secret and in- 
accessible retreats, worshiping Nature with a mus- 
cular and deep-seated Christianity, which elicits 
numerous points of fervid and prolific contact; 
born to wrestle with the to and fro conflicting 
wind and rain," like Jacob with the angel, till 
they pour her forth a blessing. 

It might well be inferred that pioneers so nu- 
merous and so energetic would give an impulse 
almost irresistible to the study of botany and the 
search for flowers. It assuredly did give a pre- 
vailing tone to the society at our hotel and was 
the cause of many excursions, picnics, rendezvous 
and other gatherings naturally resulting from a 
similarity of tastes and from congenial interests. 
To people of leisure it was a great resource, and 
did much to prevent ennui, if nothing else, by an 
innocent pretense bringing together those who 

1 Taine in his Notes sur VAnghterre remarks of the English 
ladies, " Elles tiennent ainsi le globe au bout de leurs doigts." 



BOTAXY IX THE ENGADIXE. 161 



had little in common and animating the better 
part of their natures by a little healthy fiction. I 
was much surprised to observe the manifold variety 
of those who exhibited a liking for flowers, espe- 
cially in the matter of their physiognomy, which 
in many cases was very deceptive and amply illus- 
trated the saying of Duncan, — 

There no art 
To find the niincVs construction in the face/^ 

Some loved the flowers for their beauty ; some 
for their wonderful structure and exquisite adap- 
tation ; some were lost in the study of their ad- 
mirable classification and the perfect symmetry of 
botany as a science ; some favored the exercise to 
which the subject conduced ; some the social ele- 
ment which it certainly nourished most profuse- 
ly. Altogether, I was convinced that botany is 
a many-sided pursuit, and to my observation at 
Pontresina it showed numerous phases that were 
quite novel and which I had never before imagined 
to have even the slightest connection with it. 

There was at our hotel an Oxford student who 
w^as readino; for his deoTee and had been sent to 
Pontresina as the most suitable place in which ''to 
unsphere the spirit of Plato " ^ and accumulate 
such ancient and other lore as might fit him for the 
post of senior wrangler. For some days after his 

1 La lecture de Plato, on ne sait comment, augmente en nous 
le susceptibilite a distinguer et a admettre toates les belles verites 
qui pourront se presenter, Comme Tair des montagnes, elle ai- 
guise les organes et donne le gout dcs bons aliments." (Joubert.) 



162 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



arrival he was to be seen in a quiet corner by the 
hour together with a ponderous tome before him, 
absorbing and absorbed. But even he was at last 
won from his lofty allegiance by the seductions 
of botany, and so completely that he finally gave 
up all his time to this enticement, having doubtless 
suddenly found that his education had been quite 
neglected in this respect, and wisely concluded that 
it was " never too late to mend." He was first in- 
fluenced in that direction by a charming young per- 
son of the persuasive sex, who had taken pity on 
his forlorn condition and solitary life, in the hope 
that the mild infusion of a pursuit less exacting 
and more sociable would mitigate his hardships 
and in divers other ways tend to his improvement. 
The result was most creditable to her discernment 
and to her admirable knowledge of mankind. Sel- 
dom does the cure so quickly follow in the steps of 
the remedy. After a little while the study became 
so deeply attractive that Plato was left for hours 
and then for days together on a chair in lonely 
grandeur like a venerable and wondering sphinx, 
while their former adherent transferred his fealty 
to Linnseus and Jussieu. A new creation had ob- 
viously dawned upon him of which he could see no 
end. In all his experience so bewitching an object 
had never been brought to his attention ; so dif- 
ferent from the incongruous facts and the elabor- 
ate tangles of dry bones peculiar to other sciences. 
Never was there a science so abounding in roman- 
tic associations and tender little episodes ; in softly 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 



163 



rippling sibillations and bandying of gentle plati- 
tudes to and fro ; such simmerings in the sunshine 
or cool cooings in a shady wood, crowning a dim 
yista ; such cozy walks and rambles, which even 
the distant dinner bell hardly interrupted. And 
then the endless explanations and mystical tete-a- 
tetes which were necessary I Really, the analysis 
of a flower appeared to be the most engrossing and 
exhaustive of human allurements. 

It is a good thing to strew a table with pistils, 
stamens, corollas, and the other parts of some rare 
blossom, in the effort to gratify a laudable curios- 
ity and an edifying spirit of investigation. Flow- 
ers have few or no nerves and no muscles with 
which to writhe when dissected, and even when 
torn limb from limb they continue to send forth 
the aroma of Christian forgiveness. Hence the 
sight of two young people imparadised in such an 
occupation is not only not displeasing, but, on the 
contrary, is rather edifying. It is nothing, how- 
ever, to the scene when the microscope is used. 
The resources of this instrument are simply in- 
finite ; but it is botany alone that, great as they 
are, reveals them in all their significance. It is a 
fresh example of Nature's inscrutable way of adapt- 
ing means to ends. Never was there an invention 
that accomplished such results, or of which the 
wonders were more tempting, or which offered 
better returns to the incessant attention that it 
demands. Two persons are absolutely necessary, 
no more, no less, and these must be very close in- 



164 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



deed to each other to make the results complete. 
In this instance their faces at times nearly touched, 
so intense was their absorption ; and then such ex- 
planations as were imperatively demanded, and 
such questions upon questions, and such appeals to 
the eye and the ear, and such sidelong glances, as 
if the vision had been deranged by the apparatus; 
and then the efforts to regulate it, and the need of 
going all over it again to insure that everything 
was understood and that she did know the differ- 
ence between a dandelion and a dactyl, and had 
really heard every word ! And, after all, the ne- 
cessity which asserted itself in a peremptory way 
and not to be resisted, for a repetition of the chief 
points of the lesson on the piazza by moonlight, to 
make assurance doubly sure. Was ever study so 
exacting or so jealously oblivious of every other? 
Surely Romeo and Juliet must have been its most 
enthusiastic devotees and pursued it con amove. 
There would seem to be nothing else in the world 
that bears to it the least resemblance, except, per- 
haps, love — ''^L'amor che muove'l sole et Valtre 
stelle " — and the lines which the graphic fancy 
of the poet has written of that might properly 
be quoted apropos of the sketch I have just^ pre- 
sented : — 

" 0 cruel Love ! how great a Power is thine ! 
Under the Poles altho' we lie, 
Thou maVst us fry ; 
And thou canst make us freeze beneath the Line/' 

Meeting me one day on their way to dinner, 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 



165 



these two young devotees of science produced a 
flower, somewhat demorahzed by excessive hand- 
hng, and asked its name. On learning that it was 
a specimen of Tipsacus fullovinum the young man 
laughed derisively, but his companion thanked me 
and said that though she found botany a most fas- 
cinating study under certain circumstances and 
though flowers were perfectly charming, yet their 
names were positively frightful, in fact too much 
so to be mentioned, and very few people could ever 
remember them at all, and to tell the truth hardly 
cared to take the trouble. Upon this a lively chat 
sprang up which lasted till the end of the meal 
and would bear to be reported on this occasion 
could the writer call it to mind. I could not help 
admitting that the young lady's criticism was nat- 
ural and to the point. Many women w^ould be 
averse to distorting their mouths, perhaps incur- 
ably, and to running the risk of injury to their 
vocal organs, by these sesquipedalian words. To 
most people, also, there appears to be an unfitness 
in covering beauty so delicate with such heavy 
apparel, crushing it, as it were, like Tarpeia, un- 
der the very weight of the gifts bestowed. In the 
matter of nomenclature plants have been some- 
what less favored by science than animals, whose 
generic titles are much oftener in keeping with 
their essential attributes. When I first saw a 
rhinoceros I said to myself, " Just my idea of the 
party." Any sciolist calling the hippopotamus 
from the vasty deep would find his mental image 



166 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 

thoroughly realized by the aspect of that monstros- 
ity, exasperating the very mud in which he wal- 
lows, or the water he splashes about. If one 
should come suddenly upon a pterodactyl he would 
perceive a wonderful accord between that com- 
plexity of grilled bones and the heterogeneous 
conglomeration of syllables employed to designate 
him. And so of the Ornithorhyncus paradoxus 
and other elegant extracts. But if the novice 
proceeds to a further indulgence of his love for 
the horrible, and, inquiring for the Ampelopsis 
quinquefolia^ is introduced to the ever-gracious 
woodbine with its drapery of tender green, at first 
he turns black with disappointment, and then is 
ready to cry out against gods and men at the prof- 
anation. And his experience would be the same 
with the hyacinth bean, or Dolichos lahlah^ the 
Coliseum ivy, or Antirrhinum cymhalaria^ the 
Madeira vine, or Boussingaultia haselloides^ and 
so on indefinitely. In the matter of names, science 
would seem to have done better for our diseases 
than anj^thing else in her peculiar province. She 
frequently displays a noticeable euphony in her 
choice which implies a degree of pity or intended 
consolation for the victims. There is a shade of 
alleviation in being gently wafted to immortal 
life " by pneumonia, as if we were borne away on 
a fragrant cloud. The horrors of neuralgia might 
well be softened by its name, would one only think 
of it. Is not diphtheria as fair a name as Egeria? 
" Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well." 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 



167 



She bears a silver arrow, which she poises, sweetly 
gliding on her tranquil way. In her mien is noth- 
ing repulsive. 

And in thy sight to die, what were it else 
But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap '? " 

Anaesthesia might be a young maiden, pensive 
and distraite, listening to her first sermon ; nos- 
talgia, with large sad ej^es, regretfully watching 
the swallows ; melancholia moodily singing under 
the pines in response to their own faint murmurs : 
while hysteria and scarlatina might dance gayly 
by, with sciatica playing on a timbrel. From 
their air who would imagine that their mission 
was to cleave us with wedges of pains " and 
thrust bare bodkins up to the hilt in our quiver- 
ing flesh ? For all this let us be thankful and re- 
flect that neuralgia might have been styled JEc- 
cremocarpus seaher^ nostalgia, Schizanthus ponn- 
gens^ and thus to the end of the whole list of 
human ailments. 

While on this subject I may as well remind my 
readers that there was a time, previous to the ad- 
vent of Linn^us, when botanical amateurs were 
far worse off than they are now. In those days 
the description of a single plant was in many cases 
as dry and distasteful as a barrel of oyster shells 
and about as entertaining as the valedictory of a 
college graduate. A single species of grass, for 
example, was then described as Gramen Xeram- 
pelinum Miliacea, pretenuis ramosaque, sparsa pa- 
nicula, sive xerampelino congener, arvense, ass- 



168 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



tivum, gramen ; minutissimo semine." Linnseus, 
by his masterly talent for classification, condensed 
all this into " Poa hulbosa^^'' — Homer's Iliad in a 
luit," one might say, — which both served a similar 
purpose and also proved that floral appellations 
may be short as v^ell as harmonious to the ear, 
without loss to science. It was of this state of af- 
fairs that Rousseau wrote in the Introduction to 
his Dictionnaire des Termes d'Usage en Bota- 
nique," " Rien n'etait plus maussade et plus ridi- 
cule, lorsqu'une femme, ou quelqu'un de ces hommes 
qui leur ressemblent, vous demandait le nom d'une 
herbe, ou d'une fleur de jardin, que la necessite de 
cracher en reponse une longue enfilade de mots 
latins que ressemblaient a des evocations magiques." 
He but echoed the sentiment of the whole world 
when he thanked Linnaeus for the reform which 
he had so happily begun. 

As an excuse for many of the obnoxious desig- 
nations now in use, it may be said that they are 
formed from those of great and honorable men, 
devotees of science, who have left behind them a 
record which proves their good desert and which 
their successors should be proud to keep ever be- 
fore their race. Certainly this ought to be the 
pleasure, no less than it is the duty, of all those 
who have any culture themselves or respect for it 
in others. In our haste to belittle and vulgarize 
everything, we forget that there are certain obvi- 
ous liabilities in matters seemingly small as well 
as in grand affairs. Numerous plants bear the 



BOTANY IN TEE ENGADINE. 169 

names of men as truly illustrious and as truly good 
as any that have ever lived, and who have asserted 
their claim to immortality by deeds as greatly dar- 
ing ; by courage and endurance as noble ; by de- 
votion as stern as that of any martyr or hero whom 
we now adore. From the Arctic Circle to Pata- 
gonia, there is no part of the earth's surface that 
has not borne the impress of their feet. The jun- 
gles of Africa and the steppes of Russia ; the 
snowy slopes of the Himalayas and the precipices 
of the Andes; the islands of the South Sea and the 
desert wastes of Australia, have all offered ample 
testimony to the worth of those who dared do all 
that might become a man as followers of the sci- 
ence they loved, and which so fully deserved their 
homage. Even life itself they spared not in the 
cause that was nearest and dearest to them. Well 
might Linnaeus exclaim, O bone Deus ! dum 
aspicio fata Botanicorum, an sanos vel insanos in 
plantas eos dicam h^reo profecto." 

The exalted sacrifices of himself and his succes- 
sors have quickened his words with the vital leaven 
of eternal truth — that truth which so often hides 
its heart in the lustre of genius. Heaven forbid 
that we should refuse them the recompense so 
hardly earned. Cur itaque denegabimus botan- 
icis omne proemium ? omnes honores ? omnem me- 
moriam ? O infausto sidere nata scientia absque 
ullo proemio ! Tu sola." 

Botanists do not ask for much, and are mostly 
content that the consecration of a lifetime to a 



170 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



pure and elevating worship should be acknowl- 
edged by the simple tribute of a name. Even the 
vanity of Linnasus sought to exact no great return 
for his matchless labors, when, hoping that it 
might be conveyed to a remote posterity, he in- 
trusted his fame to that fragile twin JBlower, even 
as the goddess of love confided to twin doves 
the celestial splendors of her car-borne majesty. 
Slight as seems the medium of this immortality, it 
is magnified and ennobled by the thought that in 
the eye of the naturalist the humblest growth has 
its place in the magnificent order of the universe, 
and is no less the offspring of infinite wisdom than 
the forest with its mysterious utterance or the 
mountain peak with its ever-varying garniture of 
clouds. Delicate though it be, it is still a link in 
that chain with which we are bound about the feet 
of God. And yet so ignorant and so thoughtless 
is our poor humanity, that everything is narrowed 
down to the scanty limits of our own comprehen- 
sion. 

Our meddling intellect 
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things/' 

Few appreciate the deep significance of plants 
and flowers, and fewer still are they who care to 
promote their estimable mission of keeping be- 
fore the world the names of the truly deserving, 
though these might thus become familiar in our 
mouths as household words. Illustrations of this 
are so abundant that it is almost superfluous to re- 
fer to them. One of the most popular and most 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 



171 



attractive objects now reared in our homes, out- 
ranking all others by the vigor of its habit and the 
profuse grace of its ever-springing foliage, belongs 
to a genus entitled Tradescantia, thus called in 
honor of the two Tradescants, father and son, who 
were eminent botanists in England during the 
greater part of the seventeenth century. They 
were men of energy, talent and learning, and in 
an age when even the shortest excursion was en- 
cumbered with dangers and hardships they made 
numerous expeditions in behalf of their favorite 
science. They were its pioneers in Great Britain 
and " to John Tradescant the elder posterity is 
mainly indebted for its introduction in this king- 
dom." They died full of years and honors, leav- 
ing a record which should insure them the respect 
of the world. The means employed to keep this 
in perpetual remembrance is inoffensive, to say the 
least, and even the pronunciation of their name is 
not at all difficult. No obstacle whatever exists to 
its daily use, but does one ever hear it applied to 
the lovely ornament upon which it has been con- 
ferred ? On the contrary, the plant is invariably 
stigmatized with the epithet of Wandering Jew." 
For this there is no excuse, though, apart from all 
other considerations, it would seem in better taste 
to recall the memory of two good Christians than 
that of one bad Jew, whose only claim to distinc- 
tion comes from the fact that he cursed with a bit- 
ter curse the Saviour of mankind on his way to 
death and so became the prey to eternal remorse. 



172 GLEAXIXGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



Similar examples might be produced without end, 
but this will suffice to justify what I have written. 
Not only is it no credit to the culture of our age. 
but it is especially derogatory to that of our own 
nation, which prides itself on its universal intelli- 
gence and its general superiority. 

About the middle of August our botanical fervor 
was much increased for the nonce by the sudden 
advent of a fat little pseudo-savant, who displayed 
the broadest interest in this pursuit and at once 
proceeded to lay down the law to everybody in a 
way that for some time carried all before it. He 
was a dapper man, of mature years, with a nerv- 
ous movement, a pompous air, and such dignity 
as could come from a bulbous stomach, light gai- 
ters, and a shirt-collar upright as iiristides and 
as white as his ghost. His cheeks were red, 
like a new fire-engine, wliile his hair was redder 
still, and of that aggravating, irrepressible stiffness 
which thwarted all efforts to keep it down. When 
he removed his hat his locks generally stood ab- 
ruptly on end, as if much shocked, and this pecul- 
iarity, added to a couple of beady and inquisitive 
eyes, gave him an expression of incessant smart- 
ness, like a poser ever on the alert, or a zouave 
with the " Qui va la I *' always on his lips. This 
was at times intensified by gold-mounted specta- 
cles, assumed when he wished to look unusually 
diofnified. He was bristlinor with nerves and sus- 
picions, spry as a lizard, and ever jumping at a 
chance to challenge the world to a quick and per- 
emptory account for everything they said, did, sug- 



BOTANY IN THE ENGADINE. 173 



gested, or even intimated. He seldom or never 
sat down, and that only for a few seconds. When 
so doing he gave one the impression that there 
were tacks or other urgent repellents on the seat. 
While erect he was evidently conscious of his 
slight stature and inflated his figure to the best of 
his ability, balancing himself on the tips of his 
toes, like a bantam learning to crow, and snapping 
his fingers occasionally to let off the electricity 
with which he seemed charged to overflowing. 
His person was sleek and plump and his cheeks 
absolutely glistened at times with comfortable self- 
satisfaction, as when one has climbed to a great 
height and thence looks down upon the rest of 
mankind. He proved to be very obstinate in his 
temperament, and this might have been inferred 
from his nose, which had no more point than a 
temperance tale and was as short as the tail of a 
goose. It was, moreover, so extremely "tip-tilted," 
— to use the latest elegant euphemism, — that any 
Welby pug who had lost this organ might have 
asserted a claim to it in a court of law with good 
chances of success. His next friend could n't have 
done him a better turn than to pull it early and 
often. 

As can be easily imagined, this vivacious little 
connoisseur was welcomed with rapture by the 
elderly maidens, as one who had attained to years 
of discretion and might be made the secure reposi- 
tory of any number of female confidences. This 
enthusiasm, however, he hardly returned, though 
he accepted their hospitable ovation quite gra- 



174 



GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



ciously, as a tribute well deserved. But he was 
not gallant enough to make any sacrifice to their 
sex, and while they often intimated their delight 
in long and hazardous excursions and the pleasure 
they would derive from the company of a gentle- 
man of bravery, accomplishments and discretion, 
he never swallowed the hook, though he absorbed 
the bait with sly gusto. He always went off by 
himself, his white gaiters playing a twinkling alle- 
gro along the road, and would disappear for hours, 
perhaps for the whole day. In the evening he 
would again be seen, like Mars suddenly shining 
from behind the clouds, and would produce a red 
bandana filled to bursting with a nondescript med- 
ley of Alpine treasures. Pouring them all out on 
the table at once, he would expatiate with impetu- 
ous tongue and gesture on their numerous merits, 
invariably bestowing on each some appalling name, 
the accuracy of which even the few doubters dared 
not dispute, from sheer inability to utter it. Do 
you know this ? " he asked, holding up a cluster 
of orange-colored blossoms, much crumpled and 
broken off hastily at the top of the stem. But 
where are the leaves? Ah, here they are!" he 
continued, after fumbling for a short time aiaong 
the debris before him. Smell them." They 
had a disheveled air, like a woman just interviewed 
by a tornado, but still retained a strong and pecul- 
iar odor. When our eyes and nostrils had been 
titillated into a lively curiosity, he observed, This 
is a Senecio, and botanists have given it the specific 
name of ahrotonifolius^ because the scent of the 



BOTANY IN THE ENGABINE, 175 



leaves and their shape as well resemble those of 
the Southernwood, which the ancients used to call 
alrotoniim,^'' 

He paused like one who had conferred a great 
benefit on mankind. Such an expression may 
have appeared on the face of Gibbon, when he had 
laid down his pen on completing the" Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire." We all murmured 
our praises and he glittered like a constellation in 
response. " And what may this be ? " said a 
voice in the background. I turned and saw the 
Oxford student, who had been silently looking on 
unnoticed. There was mischief in his eyes and 

Miss at his side. He proffered a yellow 

flower with deeply-cut foliage. " This," said the 
virtuoso, cautiously bringing the specimen into the 
focus of his glasses and examining it with hesita- 
tion, " this is the Anemone sidj^hurea,^^ " Is that 
so ? I thought I heard some one call it Eraiithis 
hiemalis^^' replied the youth, refreshing his mem- 
ory from a paper which he had been carefully 
hiding behind him. " And pray may I inquire," 
demanded the savant, expanding himself and look- 
ing round with a sarcastic smile, dwelling an in- 
stant on the word inquire," as if ask " would 
have been quite inadequate to express the pent-up 
lightnings which were reveling within him, " may 

I inquire who told you that ? " Professor ; 

I got it from him this morning," was the cool re- 
ply. This was the name of a well-known pundit, 
a very Darwin among botanists, who was staying 
at our hotel, but had thus far been careful to keep 



176 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



aloof from the groundlings and seldom showed 
himself except at the table-d'hote. 

There was a moment's pause, and then the pep- 
pery sciolist turned upon his tormentor : " Well, 
sir, j^ou may tell " — But he could speak no more. 
He was silent from mere wrath. No words could 
express what he would have been glad to say. 
He blazed upon his antagonist like the Northern 
Lights, and the fire of those indignant eyes behind 
those golden spectacles was fearful to behold. 
Vivid flashes seemed to dart from his choleric 
little soul. A slight foam was on his lips and his 
cherubic cheeks became a deeper red and then 
almost purple. He puffed and panted with spas- 
modic ejaculations. Apoplexy appeared imminent. 
At length, wiping the perspiration from his face 
with the glowing bandana, he gathered strength 
and self-control enough to attempt the avenging 
of the public wrongs thus maliciously heaped upon 
him. With vast scorn he said, " And are you 
aware, sir, that Linnaeus, the great Linnaeus, prin- 
ceps hotanicorum " — He turned full upon his per- 
secutor to see the effect of his thunderbolt, but 
found only the space he had lately occupied. Not 
wishing to await the result of the storm he had 
raised, the Oxford student and his companion had 
vanished. As they passed me he remarked, " I 
thought I 'd tap the bombastic little duffer, and 
let out some of his electricity, but I had no idea 
what a lot there was in him." And they left the 
room with a laugh which the raging botanist was 
lucky not to hear. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 

The rise and progress of a simple and unculti- 
vated community seldom reveal many features of 
interest or profit, nor would the world in general 
care much for the history of the Engadine, were 
it not for the belief, held by some scholars, that it 
was occupied ages ago for a long period by the 
founders of the Etruscan dominion in Italy. The 
visible monuments, if any, which these left behind 
them in that region and which have survived to 
this day, are few and ambiguous, but it has been 
thought that valuable aid was furnished to this 
theory by the names which various localities have 
borne from time immemorial. Could any definite 
connection be established between these and sim- 
ilar designations used in ancient Etruria, it was 
hoped that some progress would be made towards 
solving the momentous problem of the origin of the 
Etruscan race, which has so long stimulated the 
curiosity and the shrewdness of the learned. This 
step being gained, one might reasonably anticipate 
the discovery of the key to that mysterious Etrus- 
can language, a language which has been truly de- 
scribed as " dead in the fullest sense of the word," 

8* 



178 GLEAXIXGS FROM POXTRESIXA. 



and has thus far baffled the scrutmy of the ablest 
scholars. Trustmg that my readers will gracioaslv 
excuse the mtroduction of a topic apparently so 
foreign to the scope of my work, I will try to un- 
fold it as briefly as a due regard to clearness and 
thoroughness may permit. 

Of the importance attached to ancient Etruria, 
not only by students of history, but by devotees 
of every other branch of knowledge, it is hardly 
necessary to speak. She was a mighty power in 
Italy and the ruling state when Romulus and Re- 
mus were beginning their settlement of freebooters 
on the Palatine. Her influence over the fortunes 
of Rome was vast and left a deep and permanent 
impress. There is no doubt that she took a lead- 
ing share in building up the dominion which was 
ultimately to destroy her. It was only after a 
fierce rivalry lastino; five hundred vears that she 

I/O I- 

was entirely subdued, but not until she had once, 
at least, trampled her mighty antagonist in the 
dust and taught her, as did afterwards the Gauls 
and the Carthaginians, that the path to final tri- 

^ It is now quite generally admitted tliar the Etruscans entered 
Italy and there at last established themselves about the thne of 
the Trojan war, that is, in the twelfth or the thirreeiith century 
B. c, and more than four hundred years prior to the foundation of 
Eome. 

The Etruscan rule, which, in the fifth and sixth centuries b. c, 
embraced nearly all Italy, lasted — with the interval of conquest 
by the Kymric Boii in b. c. 396 — till b. c. 2S1, and its dialect 
tin b. c. 202 ; thus the life of the nation ranged between nine 
hundred and a thousand years." (Etruscan Bologna. By Rich- 
ard P. Barton.) 



TEE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 179 



umph often leads through the bitterest humiha- 
tion.^ 

Great as she was in arms, Etruria was also great 
in agriculture and in the sciences of her time. In 
the arts she was excelled by Greece alone. For 
plastic works in clay, terra-cotta and bronze the 
neighboring nations were long dependent on her 
artisans. The bronze wolf of the Capitol, " the 
thunder-stricken nurse of Rome," so familiar to 
all travelers, — one might more properly say, to 
all mankind, — is undoubtedly of Etruscan work- 
manship and the legend which it embodies has 
been traced to Eastern Asia. The jewelers and 
metal-workers of Etruria were the most skillful 
and accomplished in Italy. The majority of the 
Roman gods and goddesses show their paternity 
by the remarkable resemblance between their 
names and those of the Etruscan deities. The 
former people also adopted many of the religious 
beliefs and ceremonies,^ as well as numerous polit- 
ical institutions, of Etruria. For several centuries 
the Roman youth were instructed in her culture 
and language. From this source Rome derived 

1 The Capitoline exhibits at this day traces of an Etruscan oc- 
cupation/^ (The Edinburgh Review, April, 1879.) 

2 "Les Romains ont evidemment recu des Etrusques la science 
religieuse et on a trouve dans les tombeaux etrusques des monu- 
ments qu'on a juge's appartenir au culte de Mithra. Ainsi, les 
Romains auraient recu des Etrusques, peuple profonderaent cor- 
rumpu, des elements religieux d'une nature superieure et auraient 
retrouve I'analogie de ces elements avec Torganisation morale de 
la societe/' (De la Divinite du Christianisme. Par Charles Le- 
normant.) 



180 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



her theatrical exhibitions, the model of the Coli- 
seum, her horse-races, her pipe-players and, quite 
probably, her whole system of music. There are 
good reasons for believing that even the rudiments 
of Roman architecture should be credited to this 
origin. The drainage works, notably the mighty 
Cloaca Maxima, and the aqueducts which gained 
such universal fame for the Roman engineers were 
merely the fruit of Etruscan skill and science. In 
her sanitary regulations the nation displayed a 
novel and enlightened policy, which has hardly 
been equaled to this day. The sewers that were 
designed for her towns were so complete and well- 
built that they are frequently yet in use, while no 
dead were allowed to be interred within the walls. 
Even the military science of the future mistress of 
the world was introduced by Etruscan conquerors 
or learnt from Etruscan enemies. And what more 
natural than that the beginnings of the Roman 
navy may have been indebted to Etruscan rather 
than to Carthaginian models ? But it is not merely 
to analogies drawn from the arts and sciences that 
one can refer as evidence of Roman obligation in 
this direction. Hosts of names holding high po- 
sitions in Roman annals and ao'reeino^ with those 
found inscribed on Etruscan sepulchres leave us no 
alternative but to attribute a laro^e Etruscan ele- 
ment to the best society of Rome. Though the 
resistless advance of that empire absorbed and re- 
duced to uniformity with herself the language, 
manners and institutions of her once formidable 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 181 



foe, the Csecinas and the M^cenases conspicuous 
in her records show that Etruria still continued to 
live, not as a nation, but in the persons and ex- 
ploits of her Romanized children. Through them 
the effects of her peculiar culture are felt even in 
our day, and as Humboldt with truth remarks, ''It 
may be said that the reflex action of tliis influence 
still persists in its secondary and remote political 
effects, inasmuch as, for ages, Rome stamped her 
character, with more or less permanence, on the 
civilization and mental culture of mankind." 

Not only to these solid and tangible advantages 
did the Etruscans devote themselves, but they 
even bestowed their attention upon the dusky and 
debatable realm of spirits, and undoubtedly devised 
the whole system of ghosts and apparitions now in 
vogue, the resemblance of which to those of our 
own day is too striking to admit of any hesitation 
as to their origin.^ In fact one of the very few 
words in their language to which an undoubted 
meaning has been granted is that which signifies 
" ghost." A German historian has also maintained 
the right of the Etruscans to be called the invent- 
ors of archgeology and antiquarian research. His 
argument is certainly a credit to his ingenuity, 
though it cannot be said that great progress was 
ever made in that pursuit by a race who not only 
never succeeded in discovering their own ancestors, 

1 "Das ganze Gespensterwesen des heutigen Eiiropa hat immer 
noch die grosste Aehnlichkeit mit jenem altetruskischen/' (Die 
vorchristliche Unsterblichkeitslehre. Von Wolfgang Menzel.) 



182 GLEAXIXGS FROM POXTRESIXA. 



but did not express any interest in finding them. 
If, however, their title to this distinction be based 
upon the work they provided for those that came 
after them : upon the abundant store of perplexing 
questions, vague enigmas and tangled mysteries 
which they bequeathed to the archreologists of all 
future time, then it must be admitted that their 
claims cannot be disputed with any hope of suc- 
cess. If there ever were any antiquarians in Etru- 
ria, they certainly fostered their favorite study in 
a wav that was both thoroug-h and effective, and 
mfused into it a life that will apparently never 
cease. 

The Etruscan priests were clever observers of 
nature and shrewd speculators in thunder and 
lightning, which they used for religious purposes, 
especially for divination.^ They had a thunder 

^ ^' A peculiar characteristic of the Etruscans was their mcliua- 
tion for cultivating an intimate connection with certain natural 
phenomena. Divination, which was the occupLuion of their eques- 
trian hierarchical caste, gave occasion for a daily observation of the 
meteorological processes of the atmosphere. The Fiuguratores, 
observers of lightning, occupied themselves in investigating the 
direction of the lightning, with ' drawing it down/ and ' tiu-ning 
it aside.'' They carefully distinguished between flashes of light- 
ning, from the higher regions of the clouds, and those ;Vhich 
Saturn, an Earth God, caused to ascend from below, and which 
were called Saturnine-terrestrial lio-htning ; a distinction which 
modern physicists have thought worthy of special attention. Thus 
were established regular official notices of the occurrence of storms. 
The AgucBlicium, the art of discovering springs of waters, which 
■was much practiced by the Etruscans, and the drawing forth of 
water by their Aquileges, indicate a careful investigation of the 
natural stratification of rocks, and of the inequalities of the ground. 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE, 183 



calendar " for every day in the year. They were, 
so far as is known, the first discoverers of the re- 
turn-flash, the existence of which, up to the be- 
ginning of this century, was generally denied by 
scientists; and the Roman writers assert that they 
could at will draw lightnings from the clouds. 
Pliny says that Lars Porsena of Clusium," who 
reduced Rome to a tributary state, brought down 
thunderbolts by invocation. If this be true, which 
seems to be generally admitted, it must have been 
done, as Niebuhr remarks, " with the aid of sci- 
ence," and would give the king not only a prior 
claim to the famous line on the medal struck in 
honor of Franklin, when minister to France,— 

" Eripuit ccelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis/' 

but a better one, since it was only in a limited 
sense that our great countryman ''wrested the 
sceptre from tyrants." This is not a bad illustra- 
tion of Franklin's own maxim that in this world 
there is nothing certain but death and taxes." 
If we were to go a little further and investigate 
the truth of the report that the Etruscans were 
the first inventors of lightning rods and knew 
their uses, it might be discovered that our philos- 
opher had other competitors as a public benefactor. 
In any event it would make the true patriot hesi- 

Diodorus on this account extols the Etruscans as industrious in- 
quirers of nature. We may add to this commendation, that the 
patrician and powerful hierarchical caste of the Tarquinii offered 
the rare example of favoring physical science/^ (Cosmos, vol. ii., 
p. 593.) 



184 GLEANIXGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



tate to inquire iuto the extent of bis classical 
reading. 

According to Seneca, tlie Etruscans had '^ful- 
miiia lorivata^'^ — domestic lightnings, — and these 
would appear to have survived to our day. To 
them also belonged that ingenious umbrella with 
metallic points, under which the augurs could 
make their way unharmed through the most omi- 
nous thunder-storms. This may serve to account 
for the frequent representation of that article on 
the walls of their tombs. ^ 

^ The prestige that for ages had accrued to the Etruscan augurs 
from their supposed control of every form of electrical manifesta- 
tion, as well as the extent and long duration of the national influ- 
ence, even after its sway had ceased, are well illustrated by the 
historian Zosimus in his narrative of the first siege of Rome by 
Alaric, which took place during the autumn of a. d. 408, when 
Innocent I. was pope. 

While they were debating these things, Pompeianus, praefect 
of the city, happened upon certain who had come to Rome from 
Etruria, and said that a town, called Xeveia, had been saved from 
impending perils and had driven away the barbarians who threat- 
ened it by means of offerings made to the gods and worship after 
the manner of the fathers, by which terrific thunder and lightning 
had been evoked. Having consulted with these, he did what was 
deemed expedient according to the books of the priests, but the 
belief which then prevailed having occurred to his mind, that he 
might the more safely do that which he proposed, he imparted 
everything to the bishop of the city. This was Innocent, who, 
preferring the safety of the city to his own belief, privately gave 
his permission that they should do whatever they could. T\lien 
they said that the city would gain nothing from their efforts, un- 
less the Senate met in the Capitol and there, and also in all the 
public resorts, performed the usual sacred rites, no one dared to be 
present at ceremonies celebrated according to the ancient custom, 
but, those men from Etruria having been ordered to depart, the 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE, 185 



Nothing pertaining to the rise of greatness so 
marked and so prolific could ever have been lightly 
regarded, even had it not borne so close a connec- 
tion with the progress of Rome, — that central sun 
of history round which all else revolves,^ — but 
with this further claim on the world's attention 
we cannot wonder that it has exercised an irresisti- 
ble fascination over the ablest minds, even though 
their united efforts have, in many respects, but 
dimly unveiled the truth. Naturally this has been 
the strongest upon the numerous scholars who 
have devoted themselves to the history of that 
empire, and it is they who have been the most 
eager to enrich their writings from Etruscan 
sources. Unluckily they have been much impeded 
by lack of materials, for though the Etruscans 
had an ample history and a varied literature of 
their own, though many volumes of annals and 
other records were preserved as late as the first 
century of the Christian era, these have all per- 

citizens addressed themselves to appeasing the barbarian with all 
zeal." (Zosimus, lib. v., cap. 41.) 

The same story is somewhat more clearly given in the Histona 
Ecdesiastica of Sozomenus, lib. ix., cap. 6, who says that cer- 
tain Etruscans, summoned for this purpose by the praefect of the 
city, engaged to drive away the enemy with the aid of thunder and 
lightning, declaring that they had done this at Narniae, a city of 
Etruria, which Alaric passing by on his march against Rome had 
not captured. But the result showed that these could do nothing 
for the city.'' 

1 " The history of all nations of the ancient world ends in that 
of Rome, and that of all modern nations has grown out of that of 
Rome." (Niebuhr.) 



186 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



ished and with them the language in which they 
were written gradually shrank away from human 
ken. From a literary point of view it may be 
doubted whether this was a great loss, for had the 
various histories, tragedies, and even poems that 
are mentioned by Roman writers possessed any 
peculiar merit, they would assuredly have been 
translated into other tongues in spite of the diffi- 
cult and forbidding characters in which they first 
appeared. As it is, not one of these works has 
survived to our time and it has thus come to pass 
that for such fame as she won Etruria is indebted 
to her vanquishers, and, as might have been an- 
ticipated, the details they have handed down to us 
are not very plentiful or very trustworthy. This 
applies especially to those concerning her earlier 
history, which are both meagre and dubious. 

One possible source of information, however, 
still remained in the shape of some thousands of 
inscriptions in the Etruscan language. Almost 
uninjured by time, they are still legible, distinctly 
painted or deeply graven, principally on the walls 
of subterranean tombs in Tuscany.^ The letters 

1 " Tuscany is tunneled through and through with the tombs 
of its former inhabitants. If the Etruscans had buried their dead 
as we of Aryan or Semitic race bury ours, little should we know 
of the art, religion and social habits of this strange people. But 
it is the strongest argument for their Turanian origin that the 
Etruscans, like the Egyptians, the Lycians, the Chinese, and the 
nomad tribes of Northern Asia, buried their relatives in the house- 
sepulchre. The religion of all these races centred in a belief in 
the spirit world ; in the conviction that the ghost of the departed 
still lived to all intents and purposes, still needed ghostly food, 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 187 



are probably of Phoenician origin and are well un- 
derstood. The words are written from right to 
left, or, to speak more concisely, backwards, as we 

armor, horse, ornaments. Hence all that he prized or loved in 
his life was buried with him. A dwelling the exact counterpart 
of the abodes of the living, save that it was below the earth and 
they above it, was devoted to the uses of the dead, and built of 
solid stone masonry or hewn out of the tufa rock. Let us suppose 
ourselves in the position of the fortunate discoverers of a virgin 
tomb. Entering, we gaze on a scene of awe and wonder. Round 
the chamber is a rock-hewn bench, on which is laid a row either 
of stone sarcophagi, with the recumbent statues of the occupants 
carved on their lids; or of cinerary urns — for the Etruscans 
practiced both interment and cremation — likewise bearing on 
their caps or coverings the effigy of the deceased. Regarding these 
Tims or canopi it may be interesting to mention that Mr. Dennis 
considers Dr. Schliemann's * owl-headed ' vases — to which they 
bear a strong resemblance in shape — as of the same character ; 
and looks on the head at the top, not as the ^owl-faced ' goddess, 
but as a rude attempt to portray the features of the deceased ; the 
so-called horns being imperfect handles. Sometimes the warrior 
is simply laid on his bier in his armor ; and the first explorers of 
a virgin tomb have more than once been startled by the apparition 
of an armed figure whose skeleton rapidly dissolved into thin dust 
as the air was admitted to the chamber, leaving nothing but the 
corroded helm and breastplate in which the corpse was clad. Be- 
sides the grim tenants of the ghostly house, the house itself is fully 
furnished. The lady of fashion is surrounded by her trinkets ; 
the chief has within reach his favorite swords and lances; armor 
vases, bronzes and all sorts of articles of household use in pottery 
and metal are distributed about the tomb for the use of the de- 
parted ; and not infrequently are discovered traces of the funeral 
feast of which the relatives partook in the tomb. The paintings 
which adorned the house of the living are reproduced in the house 
of the dead. On the walls are frescos of life size, the colors and 
lines sometimes obliterated by exudations from the earth around, 
but often as fresh as when they were painted more than two thou- 
sand years ago. They depict a variety of scenes — the spirit of 



188 GLEANIXGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



should regard them, and are easy to read, though 
to this generation void of meaning. Could these 
vocal relics, these soulless sentences be restored to 
life, it was confidently hoped that they would do 
much towards supplying the loss of the Etruscan 
records and afford a fresh proof that love for the 
dead and the sanctity of the grave have often pre- 
served treasures which nothing else could have 
guarded intact. A problem of such import has, 
of course, deeply interested the most prominent 
savants in many branches of human knowledge, 
particularly during the past century. Said Nie- 
buhr, People have been extremely anxious to 
discover the Etruscan language, and who should 
not be so ? I would readily give a considerable 
part of my property as a prize to any one who 

the deceased setting out for his la^t journey to Hades, in charge of 
Charon ; the chieftain reclining at the banquet with his wife ; the 
parting of the dying man from his family ; scenes from Greek and 
Etruscan mythology. Such is a fair specimen of a tomb which 
has escaped the spoilers of twenty centuries until the irruption of 
the excavators themselves. And these are the sources from which 
we derive almost all we know of the inner life and customs of 
this mysterious race. Hence we learn the plan and disposition of 
the Etruscan house or temple ; we obtain a more than partial 
glimpse into the Etruscan theogony ; while a vast, though scat- 
tered, collection of jewelry, vases and bronzes attests the excellence 
attained by their goldsmiths, their potters and their workers in 
metal. Hence, too, we can calculate with some exactitude the 
influence which Greece and her colonies exercised upon Etruscan 
art and civilization ; and the details of personal attire and decora- 
tion are preserved down to the very corkscrew curls which, as with 
us not many years ago, were fashionable among the fair sex. All 
this, and much more, has been and is being added to the scanty 
store of information bequeathed to us by the ancients.^' (The 
Times.) 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 189 



should discover it ; an entirely new light would 
thereby be thrown upon the character of the na- 
tions of Italy." ^ But thus far the difficulties in the 
way have not been overcome, and they are almost 
the only ones of that nature yet remaining. This 
is all the more aggravating in these days of philo- 
logical research and triumph, when whole races to 
the remotest past have been definitely located, 
and, as it were, stratified with geological accuracy. 
Egypt has been constrained to reveal the long- 
buried secrets of her hieroglyphics, and patient 
skill and daring have even extorted a meaning 
from the arrow-headed symbols of Assyria ; but 
the Etruscan has not as yet developed a sufficient 
affinity to any known language to give it a mean- 
ing. " The nameless column with a buried base," 
it still stands silently eloquent and significantly 
dumb. 

In this light it is not difficult to account for the 
zeal and ability which this enticing question has 
engendered, especially within the last few decades. 
Never was there field more spacious, more inspir- 
ing, or more stoutly contested by the combatants, 
and none the less that eyevj one fought under his 
own banner and professed no other allegiance. As 
there was little or no reliable evidence, much could 
be done in the way of conjecture, and the want of 
facts was well supplied by the most copious and 
elaborate theories. All the chief pundits, Nie- 
buhr and Mommsen, Lanzi andPasseri, Donaldson 

1 Lectures on Ancient Ethnographij and Geography. 



190 GLEAXIXGS FROM POXTRESIXA. 



and Miiller, Schwegler and Diefenbach, and many 
similar leaders, assisted by scores of amateurs, 
English and other, laid about them with a will 
and were everywhere seen in the thickest of the 
fight. Sharp thrusts were dealt and returned amid 
clouds of learned dust and the flow of torrents of 
ink. There were caustic criticisms, passionate ap- 
peals, sarcasms and expressions of lofty contempt. 
A few raps were bestowed even on the slain to im- 
press them with their presumption in having once 
taken part in the conflict and to conyince them 
how much better off they were in their graves, 
where there is no speech nor language,'* ^ though 
it was surely rather hard thus to attack them 
when they could no longer defend themselves. 
Bones should be respected when the flesh is gone. 
Learned men are generally well provided with ep- 
ithets, and the greater the learning the greater is 
often the supply, as Milton proved in his contest 
with Salmasius. Philologists are, perhaps, more 
excusable than others for the use of hard words, 
since they deal in them, and, as Jules Janin says, 
il faut pardonner quelquechose a I'enthousiasme 

1 Xiebuhr [Lectures on Ancient Ethnography and Geography, yoI. 
il, pp. 209-211) declares that Passeri and Lauzi treated theJEtrus- 
can language in quite a disgraceful manner that the former at- 
tempted to translate the inscriptions with a trulv revolting imper- 
tinence/^ while Lanzi's work i:4 " thoroughly bad/' his researches 
" trash/^ and he was " completely ignorant of Greek literature." 
This would apparently warrant the inference that odium phiiologi- 
cum is own cousin to ''odium iheologicum," Lanzi had been dead 
seventeen years and Passeri nearly half a century when the lect- 
ures containing these amenities were first delivered. 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE, 191 



du metier." Naturalh^ they, of all men, would be 
the first to resent any aspersion of their parts of 
speech.^ 

The battle is still raging, with few signs of di- 
minishing vigor, as any reader of the Athenaeum " 
during the last few years will testify ; but, thus 
far, as I have above intimated, all this turmoil 
of contention has produced no substantial result. 
''Function" is yet ''smothered in surmise," and 
most of the theories advanced are as dead as the 
inscriptions they were designed to interpret. The 
origin of the Etruscan nation is about as obscure 
as ever,2 in spite of scientific emulation, and no 

1 You know M. Yon Hammer, then/^ Prince Metternich said, 
laughing. "A very extraordinary person, quite unique in his de- 
partment in Europe. But, like almost all the philologists, he is 
very quarrelsome. I do not know what it is in their pursuits 
that makes them so sensitive; but I have known a great many in 
my life, and almost all of them have been frequently in personal 
difficulties/' (Life of George Ticknor, vol. ii., p. 13.) 

All philologists would appear to be more or less consanguin- 
eous,'' and those who call to mind the piquant compliments ex- 
changed in our own day between Professor Whitney and Max 
Miiller will hardly need be informed that the race has not as yet 
shown signs of decay. In the diary of Eostwich, kept in the 
time of James I., we read that a man was found dead " with a 
long word stuck in his throat. '' This ^' word " has been always 
regarded as an error of the printer for sword,'' but subsequent 
events tend to prove that the diarist may have been correct in his 
statement and was unwittingly, perhaps, describing the end of 
some early philolofrical duel, the survivor of which had " thrust 
his reproachful speeches down the throat " of his opponent with 
fatal results. 

2 Sir George Cornewall Lewis sums up the case by declaring 
that " the Etrurians were a people whose nature, origin and af- 
finity cannot be traced beyond the limits of the territory occupied 
by them in Italy." 



192 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



one can foresee the day when she will furnish any 
contribution of special value to the history of her 
ancient adversaries. In truth, it would be hardly 
fair to expect her to do so, when we call to mind 
the treatment she received. The present state of 
the whole subject is shown by the fact that since 
1870 two works have appeared, one by Mr. Isaac 
Taylor, a philologist of distinction, and the other 
by the Earl of Crawford. The former claims to 
have demonstrated that the Etruscans were of the 
same stock with a race now dwellino- in the west of 
Siberia, and speaking the Finno-Turkish tongue ; 
and in this will be found, as he asserts, the ele- 
ments of Etruscan speech, while the latter aflS.rms, 
with equal assurance, that the Etruscans and their 
language were of Gothic origin. These are valu- 
able additions to a genealogy in which their de- 
scent has also been variously attributed to Arabic, 
Coptic, Hebrew, Chinese and various other sources. 
The climax of all these conjectures has been 
reached by some arrant enthusiast, who has la- 
beled a skull in the museum at Munich " Etruscan- 
Tyrol, or Inca-Peruvian," and who might well be 
regarded as the direct philological descendant of 

"That tyrant, far-famed, 
Whom the gods the supreme skuU-compeller had named/' 

It is only within a few years that the extent of 
the trade, dominion and general influence of the 
Etruscans has been realized. Many traces of their 
presence have been discovered in the valley of the 
Rhine and in that of the Danube. It is probable 



THE ETRUSCAXS IN THE ENGADIXE. 193 



that their caravans going north for trade for amber 
on the shores of the Baltic followed the former 
river and its tributary lakes, as the most conven- 
ient and available route, the more so that they 
could thence easily reach the contiguous settle- 
ments on either hand. In the Grimsel, the Bren- 
ner, and other passes leading from Italy they left 
behind them monuments that have survived to our 
day. In 1871, at Eygenbilsen on the Meuse, was 
found a fillet of gold, very pure, exquisitely de- 
signed and wrought, and evidently of Etruscan 
origin. At the same place was dug up one of the 
peculiar buckets which these people were wont to 
make and carry with them wherever they went. 
These were mostly of bronze, and often decorated 
with carvings and inscriptions. Numerous speci- 
mens have appeared in Italy, Switzerland, Ger- 
many, Austria, and as far north as Belgium, where 
also even an Etruscan sepulchre was excavated 
some years ago. Six of these buckets that were 
brought to light in Hanover were portrayed and 
described by Lindenschnitt, and in the " Revue 
Archeologique an account is given of an Etruscan 
wine cup, or wine can, with a spout in the form of 
a vessel's prow, which had been lying in the soil of 
Belgium, seemingly, for ages. An Etruscan scara- 
b^us was also unearthed with the numerous other 
royal treasures which were found with the body 
of Childeric, king of the Franks, in his tomb at 
Tournai, in 1653. 

The difficulties in the way of a final settlement 

9 



194 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



of the question of their descent are much increased 
by the fact that the Etruscans themselves, at least 
so far as we can discover, knew nothing of their 
progenitors. Their annals seem to have omitted 
all reference to them, nor had they a single tradi- 
tion relative thereto,^ though the other nations of 
their time were well provided in this respect, and 
Rome had no less than twenty-five distinct legends 
to account for her descent. When we consider the 
amount of labor, trouble and loss of temper the 

1 During the reign of Tiberius there was a contest among the 
cities of Asia ]Minor for the privilege of erecting a temple to that 
emperor, and Tacitus states that certain deputies from Sardis, the 
capital of Lydia, produced before the Senate a decree, which thej 
asserted to have been made by the Etruscans in the days of their 
independence. This repeated the story of Herodotus in regard to 
the Lydian origin of that people, and of course supported the 
legend of a relationship between them and the ancient Sardians. 
On this remote and dubious connection with a part of the early 
Eoman dominion the deputies based their claim to worship Ti- 
berius within the limits of their own city. But when we reflect 
that this is the only allusion to their origin anywhere mentioned, 
as proceeding from the Etruscans themselves ; that it was first 
brought to light three hundred years after Etruria had lost its 
nationality, and then only with the design of procuring sundry 
advantages for those who offered it, the evidence cannot be con- 
sidered very valuable. It is also flatly contradicted by Dionysius 
— a great authority — who states that ''the Etruscans looked 
upon themselves as an original people, descended from no other 
race, and which called itself Kasena, and knew nothing of the 
names Tyrrhenians and Etruscans." 

And yet Dunlop, in his History of Roman Literature, has no 
testimony but this passage from Tacitus, when he writes, *'It 
is evident, too, that the Etruscans themselves believed that they 
had sprung from the Lydians, and that they had inculcated this 
belief on others. Tacitus informs us," etc. (Vol. i., p. 21.) 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 195 



world might have been spared, had the Etruscans 
interested themselves in this problem, we cannot 
help thinking their modesty, indifference, or what- 
ever else it may be termed, misplaced. Perhaps 
they did not think it worth their while to investi- 
gate too extensively. Their grandsires, whoever 
they may have been, are now generally admitted 
to have done many things that were unconstitu- 
tional, to say the least. The founders of their 
state did not step daintily over the frontier with 
Bibles under their arms, their pockets full of 
charters, covenants and catechisms, and furniture 
enough to enable their descendants to prove their 
pedigree to the remotest generation. Even nowa- 
days not a few people find it necessary to proceed 
with caution in this matter. Ancestors are often 
an uncertain quantity and may themselves have 
been in a state of suspense from time to time. 
Under any circumstances they do not bear to be 
examined very closely. All they want in most 
cases is to be let alone. Even a grandfather may 
be a pernicious trouvaille, and one would naturally 
hesitate to disturb a forefather five centuries re- 
moved, for fear of the consequences. Whether 
this may have been their method of reasoning or 
not, the Etruscans certainly never took the trouble 
to provide themselves with an ancestry, and on 
general principles it can be regarded only as the 
extreme of courtesy in other nations to attempt to 
do it for them, the more so that they are now at a 
distance of twenty centuries from the scene of ac- 



196 GLEANINGS FROM PONTBESINA, 



tion, to say nothing of numberless other impedi- 
ments in the way of success. 

But maugre all drawbacks, certain results have 
been achieved, in which a reasonable amount of 
confidence may be placed, and for these all the 
more credit is due to those who have succeeded in 
extracting even a little truth from such a heap of 
confused and at times irrelevant details. Notwith- 
standing the apparent belief of the Etruscans that 
they were children of the soil and had no prede- 
cessors whose acquaintance was particularly desir- 
able, the ablest scholars are now of the opinion 
that our knowledge is greater than theirs, and 
that the part of their nation which was the source 
of all their characteristic culture were invaders 
from without the bounds of Italy, who conquered 
the then inhabitants of Tuscany more than a thou- 
sand years before Christ. At that date they prob- 
ably bore the name of Rasena. I have no room 
to present the arguments by which this conclusion 
has been reached, but they are now regarded as 
satisfactory by the great majority of the learned 
who have given their attention to the question. 
The weight of evidence tends to prove that they 
came from the North, ^ making their first start 
from Asia, and this view is aided — indirectly and 

1 Several talented and ingenious Germans even maintain that 
the Etruscans were closely connected with their own people at a 
remote period. Grimm is quoted by Schwegler in his Edmische 
Geschichte as saying, Einzelnes in etruskischer Sage und Spra- 
che klingt an Germanisches/' while Johann von Miiller styles the 
Etruscans ein deutsches Volk/' 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE, 197 



unintentionally — by Livy, who informs us that 
the occupants of R^tia in his time were descended 
from Etruscans, whom the Gauls had driven from 
the plains of Northern Etruria — now Lombardy 
— into the fastnesses of the Alps. This was a 
mere tradition, as the historian wrote simply from 
hearsay and was supported by no recorded testi- 
mony. If there were inhabitants of Etruscan ori- 
gin in Rsetia at that period, the shape taken by 
this tradition was probably but another instance 
of the peculiarity, often noticed in traditions, that 
they invert a story into its opposite, and that the 
ancestors of these people came from the contrary 
direction and finally made their way into Italy, 
perhaps voluntarily, perhaps yielding to the pres- 
sure of some horde of Asiatic invaders. 

Whatever may have been the real truth, learned 
men, acting on this hint of Livy, have done all in 
their power to detect any possible vestiges of an- 
cient Etruria in this region, especially in the En- 
gadine and in adjacent Tyrol. The dialect there 
spoken still retains traces of a foreign element, 
which has no affinity with either Celtic, Latin or 
German, but is thought to be allied, both in sound 
and in spelling, to that of the Etruscan, and the 
same idea has been advanced in regard to the names 
of numerous localities in that district. The sub- 
ject, as might have been expected, has proved most 
tempting to the German philologers and antiqua- 
rians, and has been treated with that characteristic 
thoroughness and broad interest which deem no 



198 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



theory unworthy of hivestigation, which make the 
most of the smallest fact, and do not despise any 
idea, even though it be but faintly suggestive. 
Among these. Dr. Ludwig Steub^ has taken the 
lead and won much applause by the display of 
a persistent research and keenness of scent re- 
markable even in one of his race. The discoveries 
he has made are actually wonderful, and in the 
matter of proper names, the revelations, could we 
but believe in them, are almost incredible, though 
they are in most cases such as can be appreciated 
only by the trained acuteness of a practiced lin- 
guist. According to Dr. Steub's theory, the names 
of numerous villages and other localities in the 
Engadine and in the adjoining territory evince 
such a striking similarity to those of the persons 
once buried in the Etruscan tombs, and which are 
still legible on their walls, as to justify a belief in 
their common origin, and, in fact, he maintains 
they are essentially the same, after making a proper 
allowance for the gradual corruption of the former 
by the Teutonic and other tribes who followed the 
Etruscans. Many of the examples adduced in sup- 
port of this opinion are quite plausible, but we 
soon find the doctor beyond all control and dash- 
ing round in a delirium tremens of philology, like 
an elephant in battle, reckless of friend or foe. I 
have no space to offer many instances of his deri- 
vations. Suffice it to say, they ra.nge from the 

1- Uehei- die Urbeivohner Rcetiens und ihren Zusammenliang mit 
den Etruskern. 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 199 



specious and seductive, through eveiy phase of 
human subtlety, till they finally become both ec- 
centric and audacious.^ Layin in the Engadine 
may, as Dr. Steub asserts, stand for the ancient 
Lavinium, and Ardez may suggest Ardea, though 
as these towns were in Latium and had nothing to 
do with Etruria, it is not easy to see how they im- 
prove his position. Farfarus may have degenerated 
into Pfafers, and Carutula may have been barba- 
rized into Kartell ; we may even admit that in 
the lapse of twenty centuries Taracina may have 
been distorted into Tertschein, and it is possible 
that the mellifluous flow of Cafatala has been swal- 
lowed up in the chaotic dissonance of Tschafatsch, 
as is seriously aflirmed; but if so, we can only 
conclude that truth is sometimes hidden in recesses 
compared with which the bottom of a well is as 
bright as the meridian sun.^ 

Such is the general aspect of the testimony 

1 "L^etymologie lingnistique est tout anssi perilleuse, plus peril- 
leuse peut-etre, que Tetyraologie philologique. ' Sais-tu bien, de- 
mande le docteur, d'oii vient le mot de galant homme ? — Le Bar- 
bouille. Qu'il vienne de Villejuif ou d^Aubervilliers, je ne m'en 
soucie guere. — Le Docteur. Sache que le mot de 5'a/a?i^ homme 
vient dJelegant ; prenaut le g et Va de la derniere svllabe, cela fait 
ga, et puis prenant /, ajourant un a et les deux derniere lettres, 
cela fait galant^ et puis ajoutant homme, cela fait galant homme.' 
Les moins mauvaises des etymologies de cette sorte — si tant est 
que toutes ne se vaillent point — sont peu supe'rieures a celies-la, 
soit dit sans exagerer/' (La Linguistique. Par Abel Hovelacque.) 

2 Dr. Latham in his edition of Prichard's Celtic Nations cer- 
tainly puts it very mildly when, commenting on these and other 
edifying affinities, he observes, ^'It cannot be denied that there is 
much assumption here/* 



200 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 

brought forward to prove the former presence of 
the Etruscan race in the Engadine and its vicinity, 
and some scores of similar analogies have been 
consolidated into a theory which has satisfied some 
scholars of repute, and in which even the great 
Niebuhr himself has expressed his confidence. 
Heaven forbid that outside tyros should venture 
to criticise the truly wise, but a mere superficial 
inquirer may be excused for the intimation that he 
seldom met with an hypothesis upheld by fewer 
facts, one more thoroughly imbued with presump- 
tion, or one that encountered greater or more nu- 
merous obstacles. We are vividly reminded of 
the remarks of Sir George Cornewall Lewis when 
treating of a topic allied to this : No probability 
is too faint, no conjecture is too bold, no etymol- 
ogy is too uncertain, to resist the credulity of an 
antiquarian in search of evidence to support an 
ethnological hypothesis. Gods become men, kings 
become nations, one nation becomes another na- 
tion, opposites are interchanged, at a stroke of the 
wand of the historical magician. Centuries are 
to him as minutes ; nor, indeed, is space itself of 
much account when national affinities are in ques- 
tion." ^ 

Notwithstanding the depth of Dr. Steub's learn- 
ing and the shrewdness with which he has made 
use thereof, one may be allowed to suggest a few 
inquiries in the effort to reconcile his ideas with 
truth and common sense. Putting aside for the 

1 An Inquiry into the Credibility of the Early Roman History, 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 201 



moment all philologic aspects and admitting that 
the Etruscans did remain in the Engadine long 
enough to identify many places with their presence, 
would they have been likely after their settlement 
in Italy to transfer the names of these to their off- 
spring ? Is any instance analogous to be found 
elsewhere on the earth's surface ? On the contrary, 
is not the mere intimation that they did this, espe- 
cially to any great extent, absurd, unnatural, and 
contrary to the whole course of human experience ? 
That a child should be named for a State, once in 
a century or so, is not remarkable on this side of the 
ocean. We have all heard of Virginia Dare and 
of the source of that melodious christening. When 
in Wisconsin twenty-five years ago I was informed 
that the first white person born in that country 
was still living under the heavy judgment of " Wis- 
consinia " Peck. Should she still unfortunately 
survive, I trust she will pardon this use of her ap- 
pellation. In the home of eccentricity and inde- 
pendence these examples are not so very extraor- 
dinary, though they are contrary to the practice 
of the Old World ; but it stands not within the 
prospect of belief that hundreds of tombfuls of 
people should have borne the names of villages in 
the Alps which their ancestors had abandoned 
ages before, and of which they themselves must 
have known nothing whatever.^ Certainly, this 

1 " Les inscriptions etrusques que nous possedons paraissent etre 
presque toutes d'une assez basse epoque, c'est-a-dire, posterieures a 
la fondation de Rome." (Alfred Maury.) 
9* 



202 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



appears so incredible to our daj^, that the very 
fact, if it be a fact, of this resemblance between 
two different classes of names should prove conclu- 
sively that the Etruscans never were in Rsetia at 
all. 

Again, let us for the nonce allow that they did 
thus seek to preserve their Northern experiences, 
would they not have bestowed at least some of 
their Alpine names upon those towns and cities 
which they founded in their new home ? And j^et, 
out of all the Etruscan communities in Italy, of 
which history has retained the remembrance, from 
" lordly Volaterr^ " and green Tifernum " down 
to the most insignificant hamlet, there is not one 
that in the least recalls any locality which we 
know to have existed within the limits of ancient 
Raetia. 

If the Etruscans were ever in Rsetia for any 
length of time, why did they leave no marks of 
their occupation but a thin stream of doubtful 
words ? With their taste for massive architecture, 
is it likely that they would stay in any territory 
without building at least a certain number of du- 
rable edifices ? Having such devout respect for 
the memory of the dead, is it probable that they 
would have quitted Ragtia without having con- 
structed a single tomb — they who, in Etruria, 
covered many square miles with such monuments, 
and of a solidity so great that Time has hardly 
brushed them with his wings? Should it be ob- 
jected that they did not sojourn in Rastia long 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 203 



enough to create such permanent tokens of their 
stay, how, then, could they have given to scores of 
sites names which, it is asserted, have clung to 
them till now ? Should it be claimed that they 
were less numerous, less powerful, less civilized in 
those daj^s, how could they have overcome the 
abundant population who, according to Niebuhr's 
opinion, then filled the valleys of that country ? 
And, if they did overcome them, why could they 
not compel them to rear such buildings as they 
wished, as we know the conquering Rasena did 
compel their subjects in Italy ? If they did at 
one time, as Niebuhr alleges, extend their domin- 
ion even so far north as Alsace, and there erect 
that enormous wall called the Heidenmauer, this 
question seems yet more difficult to answer. 

Again, if these names of places are of such 
great antiquity as they must be to serve Dr. 
Steub's hypothesis, why is not one of them men- 
tioned by any ancient historian, geographer or 
other writer? even by those who recorded the 
campaign of Tiberius and Drusus, when they re- 
duced the whole countrj^, whereas names of Celtic 
origin often occur? If the Etruscans had con- 
quered Raetia and occupied it, would they not 
have been likely to retain the names alreadj- be- 
longing to the various towns and villages, as they 
did in numerous instances retain those of the terri- 
tory captured by them in Italj^, as the Romans 
invariably did and as appears to have been the 
general custom in ancient times ? 



204 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



To take another view of the case, why do such 
authentic relics ^ — chiefly inscriptions — of Etrus- 
can presence as have been unearthed in many 
spots in the north of Italy become less and less 
frequent as we go north, and gradually dwindle to 
nothing as we approach the R^etian frontier ? 

But I refrain from further encroachments on 
the patience of my readers. I can only say Ex- 
cusez du peu." It will easily be seen that confi- 
dence in Dr. Steub's theory does not increase with 
examination, and that it will be necessary to clear 
up many doubtful points before it can rest on a 
durable basis. Numerous philologers of our day 
are confident that there are few words now used 
in the Engadine and its vicinity, of which the 
roots cannot be rightly attributed to either Latin, 
Celtic or German sources, and these, also, it is to 
be hoped will ultimately be followed up to their 
original germs. The word Raetia^ itself is an 

1 Among these I do not include the smaller articles, rude 
images, cinerary urns, ornaments, etc., nor even the famous bucket 
found in the Yal di Cembra, as these were easily transported from 
place to place, and thus prove nothing as to any permanent loca- 
tion ; moreover, objects precisely similar have been discovered in 
regions where the Etruscans are known never to have settled ; nor 
do I include the rude tombs of Northern Italy, Etruscan so called, 
as they are probably Celtic, since numerous examples of the same 
kind have been brought to light in the island of Guernsey and else- 
where. 

2 This was spelled Rhsetia until a late period, by all scholars, 
following the Latin writers, who thus translated the Greek TaLrla, 
but the orthography of the oldest inscriptions is that which I have 
used, and it has been adopted as the most accurate by the Ger- 
mans, and, of course, by the English, who were not sorry to learn 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE, 205 



encouraging instance of progress in the right di- 
rection. Dr. Steub quaintly observes that it has 
been ^^viel etymologirt^^^ and the facts justify the 
remark. Its derivation seems to have exercised 
the wits of mankind from an early period. Even 
Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who, in spite of 
an ignorance so barbarous that he could not write 
his own name, yet nourished a clandestine weak- 
ness for philology, tried his hand at it, and opined 
that it came from rete^ a net, that is, of mount- 
ains. Not so bad for a king ! Isidorus Hispalen- 
sis asserts that the territory was so styled quod 
sit iuxta Rhenum^'^'^ which is about as profound as 
could have been expected from a Spanish bishop 
of the seventh century, Pliny sought its origin in 
a fabulous Raetus, who was supposed to have been 
the leader of the Etruscans when driven into the 
Alps. Dr. Steub and his friends claim its descent 
from the word Rasena, by abstracting a t and 
slyly inserting an s, after their fashion. Egli, in 
his Nomina Geographica," not wishing to appear 
less ingenious than his predecessors, says, " Es ist 
vielmehr Realt = riva alta= holies ufer''' Hav- 
ing survived these and some other violent ety- 
mological artifices," it is now considered by the 
best authorities to come from a Celtic word rait^ 
which signifies " a mountainous region.'' This view 
will claim more respect when we consider that the 
greater part of R^tia, as Dr. Prichard and others 

that the E^eti dropped their h^s. Orelli, Inscriptionvm Latinarvm 
collection No. 491, says, In saxis K^eti sine H fere scrihuntur' 



206 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



have shown, is covered with similar indications of 
Celtish occupancy ; ^ an occupancy which must 
date back to the most distant ages, if we agree 
with the opinion of Pictet,^ that the Celts were the 
first to move westward among those barbarous 
Asiatic hordes who swept in succeediug waves over 
the whole of Europe. By a judicious continuance 
of this method the time may come when the Etrus- 
cans will be as thoroughly wiped out of the Enga- 
dine and its neighborhood as the Jews and the 
Saracens were driven from Cornwall by the learned 
inductions of Professor Max Miiller. 

The resources of philology are great, and in 
these days no achievement within its especial 
province can be considered entirely beyond attain- 
ment. The mystery of the Etruscan tongue will 
doubtless be solved eventually, and will be the 
crowning triumph of a science that has of late 
moved rapidly to the front with no wavering 
steps. The patient labors of its followers, their 
minute investigations, the wonderful power they 
have displayed in weaving innumerable facts into 
the firm and impressive texture of historical truth, 

1 " Wolaber deutet das dortige Romanzo mit seinem Schwester- 
mundarten moglicherweise auf eine von den Galliern verschied-ene 
Urbevolkei'img.'" (Lorenz Diefenbach, Origines Europ^se, page 
108.) 

" Im lande der Ehatier finden sich so yile keltische localnamen, 
dass wenigstens daran nicht zu zweifeln Ui, dass auch dieses volk 
eine sehr starke kehische beimischung hatte, wenn es nicht gans 
keltischen ursprunges war." (Die malbergische glosse. Yon Dr- 
Heinrich Leo^ vol. i., p. 36.) 

2 Les Origines indo-europeennes. Par Adolphe Pictet. 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 207 



have revealed to the world discoveries which m ay- 
well rank with the proudest trophies of human 
intellect. Dry as philology may seem to the ma- 
jority of mankind, nothing can be more fascinat- 
ing to a certain class of minds, especially to those 
possessed of antiquarian sympathies. Niebuhr, in 
a letter to Count Adam Moltke, exclaims, "Oh, 
how people would cherish philology did they know 
how delightfully it enables us to recall to life the 
fairest periods of antiquity ! " He beyond any 
other might write this with a full heart ; for no 
one has made greater or more successful use of its 
aid to infuse life into the dry bones of the past and 
drape its soulless form. Scholars like him have 
made philology all things to all men, until now 
there is scarcely a phase of scientific culture with 
which it has not in some degree become identified ; 
to which it has not rendered cordial, active and 
efficient help, and of which it has not extended 
the domain and deepened the meaning by shrewd 
and intricate inquiries. It has enlarged the tal- 
ent and tested the wit of almost every one who 
has earnestly devoted himself to its pursuit, and 
this, notwithstanding the deviation of some who 
have groped their way blindly. Everywhere it has 
shed a light more or less helpful, and thus it has 
happened that the words of simple folk, homely 
and unadorned, strung on the silver thread of 
speech, have preserved the lineage of many a na- 
tion more surely and effectively than the mightiest 
tomes of history. 



208 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA. 



But great as are the powers of philology, there 
are problems which even these cannot solve with- 
out the aid of genius, and the language of ancient 
Etruria is one of them. ''The remnants of Etrus- 
can speech are so infinitesimal," as Professor 
Whitney has truly remarked, that mere scientific 
industry and research can never hope to recon- 
struct the scattered fragments in any significant 
form. The task not only demands " a full con- 
sciousness of the analogy of languages," but also 
''the faculty of divination possessed by Cham- 
pollion." ^ As Professor Whitney has further ob- 
served, " a single page of connected Etruscan text, 
with but a hint of its meaning, would, in the 
briefest time, settle the question whether the race 
is to be connected with any other on earth, or 
whether, like the Basque, it is an isolated frag- 
ment." 2 But thus far this page has not been 
vouchsafed to us, and it is doubtful if it ever will 
be. We must rest content, therefore, with such 
results as have been, or can be, secured without 
it. These until now, though not entirely valueless, 

1 *^ Le genie de Champollion semble d'abord se presenter avec 
un caractere special de divination." (Yicomte de Rouge.) 

Much might have been anticipated in this field from Mr. George 
Smith, whose death has been lately so deplored as an irreparable 
loss to the world. He it was who deciphered the Cypriote inscrip- 
tions, until then the puzzle and stumbling-block of the ablest 
minds, and whose marvelous instinct for the discovery of the keys 
to forgotten languages and unknown alphabets has thus far been 
unequaled. 

2 The Life and Growth of Language. By Professor William D. 
Whitney. 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE, 209 



have not by any means succeeded in rendering 
the inscriptions legible in a way that is either 
complete or satisfactory. Every sentence has re- 
ceived a dozen different interpretations from a 
dozen different sources. Nevertheless, such prog- 
ress has been made that " the Etruscan language 
is now declared Indo-European and Italican by 
scholars of such rank and authority that the con- 
clusion must stand as probable until completely 
refuted." This has been done, let me say, with- 
out the slightest aid from ancient Rgetia, and, in 
truth, since the beginning of the search within her 
bounds, the method of procedure has entirely 
changed. Having at the outstart sought the fount- 
ain head of the Etruscans, that by this means 
their language might be understood, science now 
seeks to comprehend the language, that it may 
discover the source from which they came. In 
this light the Rsetian problem has become of no 
importance. From a philological point of view 
Rgetia is a cul-de-sac, and the road leads nowhere. 
To use a vulgar phrase, one must creep out at the 
same hole he crept in at. Granting that the 
Etruscans ever were in the Engadine, the traces 
of their presence now remaining are too scanty 
to be of the least use, the more so that they are 
neither connected with nor corroborated by any- 
thing outside that country. Why, therefore, con- 
tend for a barren and un prolific idea ? That the 
Rasena were indigenous in Raetia no one claims. 
If they came from the north into Italy as a con- 



210 GLEANINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



quering race, which is now generally admitted, 
why stop them en route, particularly when all 
existing conditions are satisfied by bringing them 
directly to their destination ? 

Should this triumph, desirable as it is, be finally 
achieved, however great the splendor it will con- 
fer on philology, and however important the gain 
to ethnography, but little can be anticipated from 
any still existing records. As I have before ob- 
served, the remains of Etruscan literature that yet 
survive consist almost entirely of sepulchral in- 
scriptions. The sentences are short, and notwith- 
standing their obscurity, it is pretty evident that 
they are concise in their style, and entirely per- 
sonal and limited in their allusions. Either the 
crop of posthumous virtues was not so great in their 
day as in ours, or if it were, the survivors did not 
care to take the trouble to gather them for the 
benefit of their posterity, though there is still this 
resemblance between the Etruscan epitaphs and 
obituaries and our own, that both have to be read 
backwards to get at the truth. Dr. Donaldson 
writes, The Etruscan inscriptions are as yet 
mostly of a sepulchral and dedicatory character 
and made up of proper names and conventional 
expressions. We have no historical or legal in- 
scriptions." And even Niebuhr, anxious as he 
was for the elucidation of their speech, admitted 
that the revelations of the Etruscan tombs would 
be likely to prove of scanty value. The discov- 
ery of the Etruscan language, and the consequent 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE. 211 



power of deciphering inscriptions in it, might be 
of some assistance ; but it is hardly conceivable 
that inscriptions should furnish much light, for 
history is contained in books onlj"." The prog- 
ress made since his time has only strengthened 
this view, and even the extraordinary ability lately 
displayed by Professor Corssen has failed to dis- 
inter one fact of decided importance, either his- 
torically or otherwise, or to make any revelation 
to the world that might not as well have been 
left undisturbed in the grave from which it came. 
To the observing mind this would seem merely 
the natural result of such investigations. Twenty 
centuries hence should some traveler from New — 
should anybody, in short, seek to illustrate the 
ethnography of this country by excavating the 
ruins of Mount Auburn, his gains would not be 
worth much in reality, however he might regard 
them at the time. He would probably infer that 
"there were giants on the earth in those days," 
but he would do us great injustice, being, perhaps, 
ignorant that Here lies " is capable of more than 
one interpretation.^ 

1 The tomb is "a trustful guardian of secret matters," and some 
of the figures portrayed on the walls of the Etrurian sepulchres 
might lead us to believe that the nation had good reasons for keep- 
ing back the truth from the ^Yorld at large, and had really made 
ancestral discoveries which they were loath to confide to any but 
the dead. If these had actually conducted them to " the missing 
link/' as one might infer, we may thus naturally account for 
their reticence in regard to their progenitors. The Darwins of 
that age were probably not so eager as now to expose to all man- 
kind the wondrous tale " of their origin. 



212 GLEAXINGS FROM PONTRESINA, 



And now it is just possible that my readers may 
be askino; what became of the Eno:adine and its 
inhabitants, and what thev were doino- throug^hout 
this long discussion. To tell the truth, it inter- 
ested them Yery slightly. Ignoring altogether the 
wonderful lineage asserted in their behalf, the sim- 
ple and innocent successors of the Raeti looked on 
with characteristic apathy, as unconscious of the 
turmoil that had been raised as their own mount- 
ains and as indifferent to the issue of the excite- 
ment as their cattle. 

Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep, 

Was all that did their sillv thoughts so busy keep.'' 

They could hardly be expected to feel much 
concern about a people that did not care enough 
for their posterity to leave even their tombs be- 
hind them. But from whatever cause, though Dr. 
Steub and his squad of captatores verhorum were 
among them for years taking notes with incompa- 
rable energy ; though their language was dug up 
and examined with a microscope to the slenderest 
fibre of the remotest root ; though the names of 
the minutest hamlets were taken to pieces and dis- 
sected in their very presence, and proved to be 
crammed to bursting with weight}^ and mysteri- 
ous significance of which their guileless souls had 
never dreamed ; though their very cellars were 
disemboweled, in the hope of detecting vestiges of 
Etruscan masonry ; though the scratches on their 
bowlders were investigated with a keenness that 
translated them into Etruscan records ; though 



THE ETRUSCANS IN THE ENGADINE, 213 



the pockets of their coats, and even of their ex- 
uberant trousers — perhaps togas in disguise — 
were searched for evidence of ancient customs, — 
they were as undisturbed through it all as the 
moon in a tornado, and nothing could even shake 
that serene and exquisite phlegm which they have 
inherited and manifested from time immemorial. 
For this imperturbability, the bequeathed com- 
posure of centuries, the Engadiners have great 
reason to be thankful. It has given them an iron- 
clad contentment with their surroundings, an in- 
dependence of thought and habit, beyond the 
power even of philology to impair, and they may 
thus be said to have reached that summum honum^ 
that highest heaven of human felicity, which has 
ever been the aim of poets and philosophers. 

" Nil admirari prope res est una, Numici, 
Solaque, quas possit facere et servare beatum." 



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